Sharp and Dangerous Virtues

by Martha Moody

  What has happened to me? Lila thought. What am I? That thought took her back to the explosion that had come out of nowhere and spared her (But why?) and her rape which was not quite a rape (“Are you okay with this?” he’d said, and, yes, in some sense she had understood the question), but if it wasn’t a rape What was it? and water which was changing but she didn’t know how (What was it?) and Janie who was not her child or lover but was nudging at Lila in a place Lila was tempted to call her heart. What was that Janie thing about? The questions started ricocheting around Lila’s brain as noisily as pinballs. She wasn’t good with the flippers, the balls kept dropping into the gutter and there was another ball shooting out at her and she had to play it, however poorly, and then there was a ball erupting from a hole she’d never noticed, and why was that other ball skidding down the center like a waterfall? She couldn’t find the secret lever, the machine was smoking and the four chords it played as music were repeating faster and faster and …

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, her left hand supporting her forehead—her thumb on her left temple and her fingers on her right—thinking she was holding her brain, a thing no bigger than a grapefruit that could cause such trouble, when a vision appeared to her, a wavery, bowed rectangular vision, and slowly she made out its outline. It was a bottle of brandy sitting atop her cabinets, and, lo! she saw that it was real, and it was good.

  CHAD’S FATHER WAS not a good dresser, but he had a friend whose belts coordinated with his outfits. When Chad was a teenager he noticed these details. His dream then was to make enough money to have a belt for each pair of pants. “I bet when you have that much money, belts won’t even cross your mind,” his mother said.

  When Chad hit thirty-five he remembered that comment. He had only two belts then, one brown and one black, and in every one of his outfits he felt fine. That was where things should have stopped. That would have been a normal life.

  Now, at fifty, he had no belts. The strips of leather that used to be his belts were wrapped around the logs he carried on Howard’s wagon. His pants were getting loose—there was in general less food, although they were nowhere near starving, especially with the two hundred jars of tomato sauce in the basement—and he wore an old scarf of Sharis’s threaded through his belt loops and tied in front. He continued to shave, but many days he left rough spots, and he treated his mirrored reflection as a person he was too polite to stare at. His hair, touched with gray, was curling around his neck. Abba had offered to cut it with the kitchen shears, but her work on her own hair had left her with a bowl cut tilted a good inch to the right, and Chad decided that he still had some pride. Now his thoughts went to where he’d walk the next day for firewood, how far they could stretch their canned goods, how many sentences Abba directed at someone without a responding word. He wondered if humans could eat tulip bulbs like squirrels did. He thought about what a fool he’d been to insist that he and his family stay through Christmas, how if any of them came to badness (that was the furthest he could think—came to badness) it would be no one’s fault but his own.

  Optimism, persistence: the virtues he’d been stupid enough to fall for.

  He didn’t talk to anyone. Chad, who had always been so welcoming, whose house people treated like a bar or restaurant, Chad now locked his doors as well as his mind. Even Derk seemed to have forgotten him. Chad had tried drawing more stories for the boys, but they weren’t interested, and a week before, in a burst of guilty generosity, he’d penciled a family portrait including Abba, but the boys and Sharis walked away before he’d finished it. Only Abba had watched as Chad finished drawing his own hair and shoes, and of course she had had comments.

  When did I become the dispossessed? Chad thought, because in a way his moping was ridiculous. He was a man with a family and food and plenty of possessions; the only thing he was missing was an office. Almost every day President Baxter messaged a variant of his message: You are safe; we are working on peace; even if there’s a conflict, our first goal is civilian casualty avoidance. It was an election year: he couldn’t kill off his voters.

  I miss teaching, Chad realized. But that wasn’t quite adequate. I miss my Dayton course. He missed standing up in front of people and being expansive. He missed talking about life as if he knew it.

  “I’M DEFINITELY PREGNANT?”

  The ultrasound technician—a beady-eyed woman in her twenties—nodded. Diana felt like she was soaring—out of this room, over this office, above her apartment and back to the Audubon Nature Center.

  “I want to be sure I understand this”—the technician’s features seemed to bunch at the center of her face—“you want to continue this pregnancy, even knowing the extreme risks? Even knowing that this fetus could have anything?”

  SHARIS HAD PLANNED to tap their maple tree but didn’t think of this until it was too late, in early March, when the daffodils she’d planted started poking up their noses. Somehow she’d thought that sap ran in the spring, not in late winter. But the Internet information she found said she should have been drilling through the bark in late January. Next year. Her chest filled with a ferocious exultation: she was planning for next year.

  Howie and Leon, their teachers settled down, were actually learning things. Long division. Topic sentences. The categories of plants.

  Sharis was upstairs in her and Chad’s bedroom, finishing her edits for the week. She’d cracked the windows open; that morning she’d pulled up some baby weeds. Chad was lying on his back on top of the bed, hands crossed over his belly.

  Lars the Norwegian was next. What affectation. He held his chin up as he spoke. He wore a scarf even at the breakfast table. What had she seen in him? She edited quickly, in something like disgust, using almost three straight minutes of Lars’s wife and daughter sitting on the living room floor, the grandchildren romping around them, while Lars slept on the sofa with his mouth open.

  She finished Claudia’s edit and put on George and Gentia’s footage, speeding through hours of their lives. There was Gentia in the kitchen, then George. They sat in chairs in various rooms. Gentia walked across the living room and the transmission cut off. They spoke to each other, briefly. They ate. You couldn’t tell one week from the next.

  Sharis tried slowing it down. She dropped the speed to three times real, and real time on the words. She got to hear Gentia selling, breathless spiels about ransacked houses and the antibomb guarantee, but George said almost nothing. What kind of soup was for lunch? His elbow still hurt. What good was music? As the moments dripped by, Sharis realized that George was a man in despair. She glanced across the bedroom to Chad. He was still on his back on the bed, eyes aimed toward the window. Sharis quickly returned to her screen.

  Chad stirred on the bed. “Sharis, how would you edit your life?”

  Astonished, Sharis looked at him and lied. “There’d be a lot of you.”

  “Good,” he said, making a small clap.

  “Why don’t I record you?” she said. “You do your Dayton course for the boys and Abba and I’ll record you.”

  He sat up. The hopeful astonishment in his face almost broke her heart.

  “CAN I LOOK?” Janie’s voice behind Lila. “Now that I’m a woman?”

  Lila started. But why should she be embarrassed? She wasn’t looking at nudes. Michelle certainly wasn’t sending her more salacious messages. And, yes, Janie was almost grown now: Lila had taken her shopping for a real bra. The selection wasn’t great, but they found something suitable. “See?” Lila grabbed her bottle and pushed her chair out of Janie’s way. “Satellite photos of Esslandia.”

  “We can see those?”

  “Why not? It’s public knowledge. They block the GPS readings, though. Look.” It was too early for planting, except for winter wheat and some exotic lettuces—chervil, escarole, mesclun: the satellite photos had these fields (in the far southwest corner of the Grid, close to the Mississippi River) labeled. Each day more ground was being plowed, grayish rectangles transformed to dark
patches with the look of wood. Even the naked fields of Esslandia were gorgeous! Lila clicked to the big picture, then zoomed to fields of different lettuces. She showed Janie several villages, then clicked onto the Alliance troops south of Cleveland, a settlement big as a city, tents ringed by vehicles, with an occasional missile (these were labeled, also) poking out of the flat landscape.

  “Why would we want to bomb those places?” Janie said. “Why does there have to be killing?”

  Childish questions. But weren’t those questions the important ones? Lila heard again the irrigation water trickling at her feet. The cat streaking past her, the rustling of the corn. She batted a bug crawling up her sweaty neck.

  “I know what you’re saying,” she told Janie. She had the bottle of brandy and a squeeze bottle of honey sitting on her desk, as well as slices of lemon on a plate. Lila found something delectable about a sip of brandy followed by a squirt of honey and a suck of lemon; it gave her a near-sexual thrill. “I was on the Grid last summer,” she said carelessly. “I spent the night there in a farmhouse.”

  “Really?” Janie said, squirting from her own bottle of honey and biting down on her own slice of lemon. “You?”

  CHAD WORE A tie. They moved all the blankets and sleeping paraphernalia out of viewing range and seated Abba between the two boys on the sofa. Sharis filmed.

  “I’m bored,” Leon said, before Chad even started.

  “Do your holographics in the basement, then,” Sharis said, ignoring Chad’s hurt look. “Just don’t bother us.” Leon stayed.

  Chad started with the Wright brothers, because they were fun and he knew every sentence by heart. “Name a midwestern virtue!” he said at the appropriate spot.

  “Cheerfulness!” Abba cried, and Sharis glanced at Abba’s lopsided hair and started laughing.

  “Good memory!” said Howard. Chad was off and running. Because Howard enjoyed the Air Force Museum, Chad changed things a bit at the end, finishing with the use of aircraft in World War I and how the people of Dayton, led by John Patterson’s son, raised the money to buy five thousand acres that would become Wright Field, the Army Air Corps’ original research base. “So while all of us today complain about our taxes, in the 1920s people in Dayton were going in together to buy the government a gift.”

  “Dupes!” Abba shouted. “Dupes and stupes!” This was an untenable position, because what Wright Field had brought to Dayton in money and talent and publicity was immeasurable, but at the moment Chad felt like scooping up Abba and kissing her.

  hubris

  “FUNNY TO SEE it without snow!” the copilot shouted. They were taking off from the Esslandian Green House again, the copilot at the controls, the whuppa-whuppa of the helicopter almost drowning his words.

  Grady glanced back at the sorry rectangle of a capitol, its flat roof and aluminum siding. He was still stinging a bit from Rapunzel’s absence. Or maybe it wasn’t absence, maybe she was hiding. Were there really three miles of tunnels hidden under that building? That was the rumor. Where had they put the dirt if they’d dug out tunnels? It was totally flat in the miles around, although there were mounds in the distance.

  “Getting kind of routine, flying up here!” the copilot shouted, aiming his words at the special envoy.

  But the special envoy wasn’t talking. Her jaw was clenched and she was looking out the window. Tentatively, Grady turned and brushed his hand against her calf. He was ready to apologize, but she made no response at all.

  “TERLESKI WANTS TO take them up to Taylorsville Dam on Sunday. He can drive.”

  “Isn’t that pretty far north?” Chad knew exactly where Taylorsville Dam was—it was part of his Dayton course—but he didn’t want to make an obvious objection.

  “It’s right near the Grid border, yeah.” Sharis said. “It’s the dam on the Great Miami.” Terleski had become a maniac with Cub Scout activities, although his own son was still too sick to leave the house. He’d taken the boys on a hunt for skunk cabbage, taught them rope-tying, built an obstacle course in his own backyard.

  “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  “Terleski’s been up there. He says it’s fine.” Sharis looked at Chad. “I’d like the boys to go. It’s good for them, good for Terleski … Good for everyone. And we’re still in the middle of Sweden.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sharis put her hand over her eyes and sighed. “Speaking of Scandinavians, the Norwegians are falling apart. I’ll leave it out, but in six months the wife’s going to want me to go back and reedit. I think he’s having an affair.”

  “Tough for you,” Chad murmured. He wondered if Sharis would have an affair if the opportunity arose. They certainly weren’t having sex anymore, even in the privacy of their own bedroom.

  Sharis said, “I worry about their children and grandchildren finding out.”

  “Isn’t there something else you could do? Event editing?”

  “How would I make any money off events? You’ve got to be there for events. And if I tried to get a regular job, they’d want my high school diploma.”

  Chad was silent a moment. He saw himself pulling Howard’s wagon through the snow with his head down, looking like an old and beaten man. “I don’t think I’ve been much good to you lately.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re always good for me.” But she knew what he meant. “I liked your talk.”

  Chad nodded. Sharis filled her cheeks with air, blew it out. “Well, what do you think? What about the dam?” She offered a final lure. “He’s taking Leon.” Meaning: we’ll have some time alone.

  “Oh, why not? All their other trips have been just ducky.”

  “Ducky?” Sharis said. “You’re talking way before my time.” They both smiled.

  MR. TERLESKI WAS doing his stupid hup-two-three-four twenty feet in front of the four Webelos and Leon, and Leon was marching like a goofball, jerking his hips back and forth and throwing up an arm on random beats. “Stop it, Leon,” Howard said, shoving in front of him. “Do you want to get us in trouble again?”

  Mr. Terleski pointed his right index finger sideways and jerked his arm out, indicating a path uphill through the trees. There were no leaves on the trees yet, it was cloudy and still chilly—“raw,” Howard’s mother had said—and the path was barely visible and slippery from the morning’s rain.

  They weren’t there and then they were, real men standing around them, with rifles and char camouflage paint on their faces. Mr. Terleski was still marching ahead of them.

  “Flippers!” Wilson halted and gazed at the men, and Howard thought this was another of Terleski’s surprises, like the puddle at the bottom of the plywood slide in his obstacle course. There was the sound of a shot and a thump up the hill: Terleski fell to the ground.

  “You killed him,” Wilson said in a high voice. “You killed Mister.” Wilson could never get Terleski’s name right.

  Another figure in camouflage appeared, this one walking down the hill, blending in so well with the background he looked like a waver in Howard’s vision. “He’s not dead, son, he’s paralyzed,” this man said. “African poison. Blowgun.”

  “Really?” Wilson squealed. “Curare?” Wilson started to scamper up the hill to look at Mister but the honorary Webelo, Bruce the sixth grader, grabbed Wilson’s arm and held him back. I’m not dreaming, Howard thought. He felt like he was going to vomit. He reached his hand behind him to grab Leon.

  “Why did you shoot our Cubmaster with curare?” said Nolan, the third scout, whose wrists were no bigger than sticks. Howard at the same time was thinking a blowgun shouldn’t make noise. Also, curare was from South America, not Africa. He flailed his hand behind him, but Leon wasn’t there. “Leon?” he whispered.

  “Who’s Leon?” Someone jabbed him in the stomach with a rifle, and Howard, doubled over, couldn’t think.

  “Who’s Leon?” someone else said, and Howard as he straightened surprised himself. “I call him Leon,” he said, pointing at Wilson. “He’s really Wil
son but I call him Leon. I didn’t see him for a second.”

  These were not good men. These were bad men.

  Could Leon have climbed a tree? He could shinny up one almost like a squirrel, as well as creep through the leaves like an Indian. How had these men not rustled? Howard looked at their feet: their shoes resembled slippers, in shades of brown and gray.

  “Come on,” said one of the soldiers. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “I should stay here, then?” Under his paint the soldier who spoke looked younger than the others, like a Webelo himself.

  “I guess. Which one you want?” And the young soldier, to Howard’s horror, pointed at him.

  “Rest of you, come with us,” the commanding soldier said, and the other Cub Scouts headed behind the soldiers up the hill.

  Howard looked at the soldier in front of him. Be prepared.

  “Guess it’s you and me, kid,” the solider said in a careless tone. The pairs around them disappeared over the crest of the hill. “I don’t have to worry about the killing part,” the soldier said. “I’ve done that; that’s no big deal.” In that second, Howard understood that he might live. Over the hill, shots rang out. Howard knew better than to close his eyes.

  “I don’t know why they don’t like me,” the soldier said. “I’m the best shot.” In his voice was a whining ache that made Howard sweaty, because it reminded Howard of himself. “You go stand in front of that big tree now, okay? I’ll show you.”

  Where was Leon? Howard walked to the tree, hoping Leon was miles away, or so high he couldn’t see the ground. He resisted the urge to look up, not wanting to give the soldier any ideas.

  “I won’t hurt you,” the soldier said, raising his rifle. “You can tell everyone about me. Don’t you move. Right ear.” He raised his rifle and Howard closed his eyes.