House Of The Scorpion

by Nancy Farmer

  “Fidelito, you idiot!” groaned Chacho.

  “He did those things. Honest!” cried the little boy.

  Jorge looked from Fidelito to Matt with an interested look in his eyes.

  “Go sit down,” Matt said in a low voice.

  “Stop!” shouted the Keeper. “I see we have social contamination of the worst order here. The aristocrat has turned this boy into his lackey. And thus, it is the lackey who should be punished.”

  “A beating would kill him,” said Matt.

  “No one is too little to learn the value of education,” Jorge said. “Why, even child kings used to be thrashed until they learned not to cry at public meetings—as young as six months of age.”

  He’s got me, thought Matt. No matter how much he wanted to resist Jorge’s authority, he couldn’t do it at the little boy’s expense. “Very well, I confess,” said Matt. “I dropped the soap in the shower and didn’t pick it up again. I threw away the porridge because there was a stinkbug in it.”

  “And?” the Keeper said pleasantly.

  “I peed in a shrimp tank—don’t ask me which one. I don’t remember. And I left water running in the kitchen sink.”

  “Assume the position.”

  Matt did so, hating himself, but hating the Keeper even more. He kept a stony silence as Jorge pranced around, trying to work on Matt’s nerves. And he didn’t scream, although he wanted to very much when the man hurled himself across the room and struck him with a force that made him almost pass out with pain.

  He straightened up and endured another blow, and another. After six blows Jorge decided he’d done enough. Or—more likely—the Keeper had exhausted his strength beating up Ton-Ton. Matt figured he’d been lucky, but he didn’t doubt that more agony was down the road. Jorge wasn’t going to give up that easily.

  Matt staggered to a bunk and collapsed. He was barely aware of Jorge’s departure, but the instant the door closed the boys scrambled off their beds and clustered around Matt. “You were great!” they cried.

  “Jorge’s such a loser,” said a tall, skinny boy named Flaco.

  “Loser?” said Matt weakly. “I’m the one who gave up.”

  “¡Chale! No way!” said Flaco. “Jorge crossed the line tonight. If news of this gets back to the Keepers’ Headquarters, he’s history.”

  “No one’s going to tell them,” Chacho said scornfully. “This place might as well be on the moon.”

  “Soon I’ll be old enough to leave,” said Flaco. “I’ll go to Headquarters then and tell them.”

  “I’m not holding my breath waiting,” Chacho said.

  “Anyhow, you were muy bravo to take the beating for Fidelito,” Flaco told Matt. “We thought you were a wussy aristocrat, but you’re really one of us.”

  “I kept telling you that,” Fidelito piped up.

  Then everyone started arguing about when they discovered Matt wasn’t a wussy aristocrat and when they knew he was muy gente, a great guy. Matt let the warm tide of their approval flow around him. He was dizzy with pain, but it was worth it if the others liked him.

  “Hey, we’ve got to get him fixed up,” Flaco said. The boys checked the hallway to be sure it was clear. Then they carried Matt to the infirmary, where Ton-Ton was already sound asleep. A pockmarked boy in a green uniform dressed Matt’s wounds and measured three drops of liquid into a spoon.

  That’s laudanum, Matt realized as his eyes caught the label on the bottle. He fought against taking the medicine. He didn’t want to turn into a zombie like Felicia or die like poor Furball, but he was too exhausted to resist for long. If he died, Matt wondered as he drifted off into a drug-induced haze, would he meet Furball in whatever afterlife nonhumans inhabited? And would the dog sink his teeth into Matt’s ankle, for taking him away from María?

  31

  TON-TON

  I feel awful,” groaned Ton-Ton, reaching blindly for the glass of water by his bed.

  “You look awful,” observed the pockmarked boy.

  “You, uh, you take that back, Luna. I can still beat the stuffing out of you.”

  “Not now that I’m a Keeper,” Luna said, smugly.

  “You’re only a trainee.” Ton-Ton managed to reach the water, but he spilled half of it on his chest when he tried to drink.

  “Wait a minute,” Matt said. He was unwilling to reach for his own glass, even though he was extremely thirsty. He suspected that serious pain was waiting for him if he moved. “You’re training to be a Keeper?”

  “Well, duh,” said Luna. “Everyone does, eventually.”

  Matt watched the light dancing on the glass of water just out of his reach. “But there’s only twenty Keepers here and—how many boys?”

  “Two hundred and ten at the moment,” said Luna.

  “They can’t all become Keepers. There aren’t enough places,” Matt said.

  Ton-Ton and Luna looked at each other. “Carlos says every boy who keeps the Five Principles of Good Citizenship and, uh, the Four Attitudes Leading to Right-Mindfulness until he reaches eighteen becomes a Keeper,” said Ton-Ton.

  No matter how carefully Matt explained to them the difference between two hundred ten job seekers and only twenty jobs, it didn’t penetrate.

  “You’re, uh, you’re just jealous,” Ton-Ton said.

  But in one area Ton-Ton was knowledgeable. He knew what went on inside the Keepers’ compound, which was surrounded by a high wall. The Keepers had holo-games and a television and a swimming pool. They had all-night parties with delicious food. And Ton-Ton knew all this, Matt now discovered, because he cleaned the Keepers’ rooms and washed their dishes. Matt figured they allowed Ton-Ton inside because they thought he was too slow-witted to understand what he saw.

  But as Celia often said, some people may think slowly, but they’re very thorough about it. As Matt listened to Ton-Ton, he realized the boy wasn’t stupid. His observations of the Keepers’ activities and his understanding of the factory’s machinery showed an intelligent mind. Ton-Ton was simply careful about his opinions.

  Matt could see the boy was deeply disturbed about the punishment he’d received the night before. He kept going back to it, picking at it like a scab.

  “I don’t get it,” Ton-Ton said, shaking his head. “I, uh, didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You must’ve done something. He sure whacked the heck out of you,” said Luna.

  “No, uh, I didn’t.”

  Matt could see the gears churning slowly in the boy’s brain: Whatever Jorge said was good. Ton-Ton did what Jorge said. Therefore, Ton-Ton was good. So why did Ton-Ton get the heck whacked out of him?

  “Jorge is un loco de remate, a complete weirdo,” said Luna.

  “No,” Ton-Ton insisted. “He’s something else.”

  Matt couldn’t guess what conclusion the boy was working toward. “What’s it like inside the compound?”

  Ton-Ton’s eyes lit up. “You, uh, you can’t believe it! They’ve got roast beef and pork chops and pie à la mode.”

  “What’s pie à la mode?” Luna asked.

  “It’s got ice cream on it! Not melted or anything.”

  “I had ice cream once,” Luna said in a dreamy voice. “My mother gave it to me.”

  “The Keepers drink real milk, too, not ground-up plankton, and they eat chocolates wrapped in gold paper.” Ton-Ton had stolen a chocolate once. The memory hovered in his mind the way the Virgin of Guadalupe had hovered over Matt’s bed when he was little.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that the Keepers have these things and we don’t?” said Matt.

  Both Ton-Ton and Luna drew themselves up like offended rattlesnakes. “They earned it!” Luna said. “They put in their time; and when we put in our time, we’ll have those things too!”

  “Yeah,” said Ton-Ton, but something seemed to be working at the back of his mind.

  “Okay, okay. I was just curious,” Matt said. He braced himself and reached for the glass of water. The pain was worse than he expected. He
gasped and fell back.

  “Pretty bad, huh?” Luna folded Matt’s fingers around the glass. “Want some laudanum?”

  “No!” Matt had spent years watching Felicia turn into a zombie. He didn’t want to follow her example.

  “Your choice. Personally, I love the stuff.”

  “Why do you need it? Are you in pain?” asked Matt.

  Luna sniggered as though Matt had said something completely stupid. “It’s a trip, see. It’s a ticket out of this place.”

  “You’re only a trainee,” Ton-Ton said scornfully. “You’re not supposed to, uh, trip out until you move into the compound.”

  “Says who?” Luna picked up the laudanum bottle and sloshed it around. “How’re they going to count all the drops in here? It’s my reward for running the infirmary.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Matt. “You mean the Keepers take this stuff?”

  “Sure,” Ton-Ton said. “They earned it.”

  Matt’s mind was working very fast. “How many of them? How often?”

  “All of them and, uh, every night.” Matt felt light-headed. This meant that every single night the Keepers turned into zombies. This meant the factory was left unguarded. The power plant that electrified the fence was left unguarded. A big sign flashing FREEDOM lit up in Matt’s mind. “Do either of you know where San Luis is?” he asked.

  It turned out both boys did. Ton-Ton had grown up there. He described, in his halting way, a city of whitewashed houses and tile roofs, of vines spilling over walls, of busy marketplaces and beautiful gardens. It sounded so pleasant, Matt wondered why Ton-Ton didn’t want to return. Why was he looking forward to life inside a compound with a bottle of laudanum for company? It was totally insane.

  “San Luis sure sounds great,” Matt said.

  “Uh, yes,” said Ton-Ton as though the thought had just occurred to him.

  Matt was bursting to tell him to dump the Five Principles of Good Citizenship and the Four Attitudes Leading to Right-Mindfulness and head over the fence to San Luis. But that would have been foolish. Ton-Ton worked toward a conclusion with the same, slow deliberation as the shrimp harvester he drove along the tanks. Nothing could hurry him. And nothing, Matt hoped, would turn him aside, either.

  When Matt hobbled to the bathroom and looked into the mirror, he got a shock. All the boys had zits. Matt knew he had them too, but this was the first time he’d had a good look at the damage. There was no mirror in the dormitory. He looked like a loaded pizza! He scrubbed and scrubbed with the gray, seaweed soap, but it only made his skin turn a violent red.

  Ton-Ton and Luna guffawed when Matt returned. “They don’t wash off, you know,” said Luna.

  “I look like a planktonburger,” mourned Matt.

  “Hunh! You, uh, look like a planktonburger that’s been, uh, barfed up by a seagull and, uh, left out in the sun,” said Ton-Ton in an unusual flight of poetry.

  “I get the picture!” Matt painfully crawled into bed. He lay on his side to spare the welts on his back.

  “We all have zits,” said Luna. “It’s the mark of people who work with plankton.”

  Great, thought Matt. Now that he thought about it, he realized the Keepers were only mildly scarred but not covered in the same active little pus volcanoes that dotted the boys’ faces. Maybe it had something to do with their food. A diet of pork chops, pie à la mode, and chocolate was obviously better for your skin than healthy, nutritious plankton.

  Jorge forced Matt and Ton-Ton back to work the next day. Ton-Ton really needed another day in the infirmary, but he obeyed without a murmur. Matt was eager to get back. He couldn’t wait to get going on an escape plan. Before, it had seemed pointless. Now he knew San Luis lay a few miles to the north, beyond a low range of hills.

  As Tam Lin once said, a jailer has a hundred things on his mind, but a prisoner has only one: escape. All that concentrated attention was like a laser cannon melting through a steel wall. Given his background, Matt figured Tam Lin knew a lot about escaping from jails.

  All Matt had to do was shut down the electricity to the fence and climb over. It sounded simple, but it wasn’t. The powerhouse was locked after dark. The Keepers counted the boys every night at ten o’clock and every morning at five. That left seven hours in which to walk the five miles to the fence (while hoping the power hadn’t been turned on again) and then twenty more miles to San Luis in the dark. If the ground was covered with cacti, the trip might take a lot longer.

  What would the Keepers do when they discovered three boys missing, because Matt intended to take Chacho and Fideito with him? Could Jorge use a hovercraft to hunt them down? Fidelito should probably be left behind. He couldn’t walk twenty-five miles. And yet how could Matt abandon him?

  Friendship was a pain, Matt thought. All these years he’d wanted friends, and now he discovered they came with strings attached. Very well, he’d take Fidelito, but he’d need more time. If he overloaded the boiler next to the Keepers’ compound, it would explode and—

  Was it wrong to blow twenty men to smithereens? El Patrón wouldn’t have worried one second over it. Tam Lin had tried to blow up the English prime minister, but he’d killed twenty children instead.

  Murder is wrong, Brother Wolf, said a voice in Matt’s mind. He sighed. This was probably what María called having a conscience. It was even more of a pain than friendship.

  “Why do we have to wait for him?” asked Chacho as they watched the shrimp harvester chug and wheeze its slow way toward their tank.

  “Because he knows things we need to find out,” Matt explained patiently. They were sitting by the farthest tank. The fence loomed up behind them, its top wire humming and crackling in the dry air.

  “He’s a suck-up. He dumps on us every night.”

  “Not since the beating,” Matt pointed out.

  “Well, that’s because he’s taking a vacation.” Chacho was unwilling to believe Ton-Ton had any good qualities.

  “Be nice to him, okay?”

  “Mi abuelita says people’s souls are like gardens,” Fidelito said brightly. “She says you can’t turn your back on someone because his garden’s full of weeds. You have to give him water and lots of sunlight.”

  “Oh brother,” said Chacho, but he didn’t argue with the little boy.

  A plume of dust rose from the back of Ton-Ton’s harvester. It settled slowly across the barren ground. The air was so still, the plume barely drifted away from the road. “You, uh, you should be working,” Ton-Ton called as his machine jerked to a halt.

  “And you should be head down in a shrimp tank,” muttered Chacho. Matt kicked him.

  “If you’re, uh, waiting to beat me up, don’t bother,” said Ton-Ton. “I can, uh, beat the stuffing out of you.”

  “Why would you assume that three people innocently sitting by the road are planning to attack you?” said Chacho. “Although it could be true.”

  “We only want to be friendly,” Matt said, frowning at Chacho.

  “Why?” Ton-Ton’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  “Because mi abuelita says people have to be tended like gardens,” Fidelito chirped. “They need sunlight and water, and their souls need to—need to—”

  “Be weeded,” finished Chacho.

  Ton-Ton’s eyes rounded as he processed this curious statement.

  “We just want to make friends, okay?” Matt said.

  Ton-Ton took another minute to consider that, and then he stepped off the harvester.

  “When was the last time you went to San Luis?” asked Matt.

  If Ton-Ton was surprised by the question, he didn’t show it. “About, uh, about a year ago. I went with Jorge.”

  “Do you have family there?”

  “My m-mother went across the, uh, border years ago. My f-father tried, uh, tried, uh, to find her. He didn’t come back.”

  Matt noticed that Ton-Ton’s speech problem got worse when he talked about his parents.

  “No abuelita?” Fidelito asked.
<
br />   “I, uh, I did. M-Maybe she’s still there.” Ton-Ton’s mouth turned down at the sides.

  “Well, why don’t you go look for her!” said Chacho. “¡Hombre! If I had a grandma only twenty miles to the north, I’d rip up this fence to find her! What’s wrong with you, man?”

  “Chacho, no,” said Matt, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “You, uh, don’t understand,” Ton-Ton said. “Jorge saw me on the wrong side of the border. There were Farm Patrols and, uh, dogs, big mud-colored dogs with big teeth. They did everything the Farm Patrol said, and, uh, the Farm Patrol told them to eat me.” Ton-Ton shuddered at the memory. “Jorge came over the border and shot them. He got into a lot of trouble for it, too. He, uh, he saved my life, and I owe him everything.”

  “Did Jorge tell you not to look for your grandmother?” Matt said.

  “He said I was born to be a Keeper. He said that Keepers don’t have families, only one another, but that it’s, uh, better because families only run off and abandon you.”

  “But your abuelita must have cried when you didn’t come home,” Fidelito said.

  “I wouldn’t have come home, you dork!” shouted Ton-Ton. “I would’ve been inside a dog’s belly!”

  “It’s okay, Fidelito,” Matt told the little boy. “That’s enough weed pulling for one day.” He asked Ton-Ton about San Luis, and Ton-Ton was eager to talk about that. The longer he spoke, the less he stumbled over his words. The scowl on his face smoothed out. He looked a lot younger and happier.

  Ton-Ton described the city so thoroughly, he seemed to have a map spread out in his mind. He recalled every detail—an oleander bush with peach-colored flowers, an adobe wall with paloverde trees draped over it, a fountain tinkling into a copper basin. It was like following a camera down a street. And gradually, he lowered his guard enough to talk about his mamá and papá. He had lived in a crowded house with aunts and uncles and brothers and cousins and a tiny abuelita who ruled the whole establishment. But it hadn’t been an unhappy place, even though they’d been poor.

  At last Ton-Ton stretched and smiled as though he’d had a fine meal. “I, uh, I won’t tell anyone why we’re late,” he said. “I’ll say the harvester broke down.” He let Fidelito ride most of the way back with him, putting the little boy down only when they came within sight of the Keepers’ compound.