Then, when she was shaking so bad from the cold she couldn't talk, and she was so pale and so cold, they got around to pushing her into the back of the police car.
They didn't even treat her like a person. They just pushed her around like a tired, old goat that had to be dragged by its horns. I think that's the worst, for her. She wasn't even treated like she was a person to them.
It was Petey that did it, I knew as soon as I heard. I was out with my mom, buying groceries at the time, on the way back from school, and I saw him in his truck driving down the street when he ought to have been locked up from the stealing and so many priors hanging over him. As soon as I heard from my mom, I knew that about my friend in a flash, like the way you know someone is going to be the love of your life, or someone is going to trip in a moment, or the way you just know someone is talking shit behind your back. It was Petey. That's who it was. That's exactly what happened.
I had that to simmer on a while. I had that to think about. I never told Mom that I saw him.
Momma and me were doing our best with the goats. It was a pain, and I hated Petey even more for this. I refused to blame the goats when it was Petey's fault. I did the milking, the mucking, and kept them locked in the barn when I was at school and Momma was sleeping. The cats, we didn't feed. We wanted them to wander off into the cold. We didn't care if they froze or the coyotes got them as long as Dolores didn't see it. We wanted rid of the goddamn cats.
That was the worst winter of my life. I still have nightmares about it, up at dawn to deal with the bleating, stupid animals before school, and my mom sleepy at the wheel trying to get the milk to the co-op when she should have been getting ready for work, driving with drowsy eyes. That smell everywhere I turned, all over my clothes and hair, and it's so cold out, and I had to shovel the snow away from the barn door, and shovel the paths clear to mud. We went into the county prison to visit Dolores, who had to do a few months on her first charge. She sat there, shaking, knowing that her mind was going a little bit more every day and it would never come back, and that was a worse punishment than if they had killed her.
Big Dolores, she didn't have me inside. She didn't have my blood. I don't think the judge understood what it meant to separate her from me. She had Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and an obscure blood type, and she needed my blood to give hers a boost. We had to wait for her bail hearing just to see her the first week. She refused a lawyer. She said she was an old goat farmer and she couldn't afford a lawyer, and she couldn't afford dispensary drugs, and she didn't care what the judge did to her.
"So you're admitting your guilt," said the judge. "You're confessing in open court?"
"Your honor, I'm old enough to do what I ought to do. I do what I need to do, and I don't..." she took a breath, a deep breath. "I don't think it matters much if one old woman is doing what she can to get by. My head hurts, your honor. It hurts so much, and I can't eat. I have a shunt. My granddaughter helps me."
"Well, I'm sorry, but you confessed. You're pleading guilty, you refuse counsel, and I have to convict you."
She spent the minimum time in jail, but it was enough. At night, she didn't want my blood. She didn't want to sit with me on the couch and plug in to me, and watch TV. Momma asked her about it, and she said "Fuck that" and she drank whiskey in the snow, sitting next to a fire she had made out of scrap wood and old fence posts. She watched her goats. She held them to stay warm. They bleated for her. She hummed and sang to them. The snow kept coming that winter.
She was shaking bad when she got home, and it only got worse.
Petey drove by and knocked on the door. I was home to see him. I stood on one side of the screen, all that cold air coming in, but I wouldn't let him in the house.
"Hey," he said.
"Ain't you supposed to be in the city by now, working a sweatshop on Rockaway?"
"It'll be a while until I can save up. I wanted to come by and say I was sorry for what happened."
"Well, I don't care about that," I said.
I could tell he was drunk. It hit me that he was drunk, and he was wobbling a little and his eyes were lit up like coal fire. "Do you want to get some ice cream?"
"No," I said. "It's too cold. Besides, I only like boys my own age. Dolores is here. You want to apologize to her, you can."
"I heard Dolores got locked up," he said.
"She did. She's out. An old lady with no priors, she got the minimum they could give her."
"Yeah." He rubbed his naked neck. "I was lucky I wasn't around when they caught that one in Drummondville. I'd have been put away for years with my record."
"Ain't nobody lucky around here. You should wear a scarf," I said.
"Maybe," he said."I got enough whiskey to keep myself warm."
"Ain't you got a scarf or something?"
"Yeah, at home."
"You should wear it. Well, Dolores is here. You want to see if she wants to hire you again, you talk to her about it. I don't think you should come back, though."
"I didn't think she would after she called the cops on me."
"You stole her wedding ring."
"You stole from her, too."
"That's not true," I said. "Don't say that."
"You did, though," he said. "You're an accomplice, and nobody caught you. I didn't rat you out, Jujube. I took the weight for you. Well, I'm going. Unless you want me to stay. Ain't it cold out here, though? I mean, goddamn it's so cold. I wish you'd invite me in. Or come out with me. One of the two."
"Don't ever say that again, Petey. You didn't do shit for me, and you only think you did."
"No ice cream, then?
"No," I said.
"You could come to my house. You ever been over to my house?"
"I've driven past it," I said. He had a sad house where he lived with his mother. She was a thin, hard-eyed woman, who had handled as much nonsense as anyone with the men in her life. Her husband was locked up, too. Their yard was a wreck. There was peeling paint. "I don't want to go over there. Your mom's there, right?"
"Not right now," he said.
"Well, I'm not going over there. Look, you should go. I've got chores."
"Did you have a while when you didn't have to open your arm up?" he said. He said it softly. "You know, when Dolores was in...? I was thinking maybe it was good she got locked up so you wouldn't have to do that anymore."
I touched the shunt. It was there. It hadn't moved.
"She doesn't do it anymore," I said. "She stopped when she got arrested. I think Dolores has quit smoking dope, anyhow," I said. "Her only medicine is whiskey. That's still legal."
He nodded, uncomfortably. "Whiskey's good for warming up in the winter," he said.
"That is true."
The wind was blowing. I was getting all that cold air in the house. I thought about stepping outside with him, but I also thought my father died in prison. He hadn't ratted anyone out for a walk.
"You done?" I said.
"Maybe I could see you later sometime," he said.
I shut the door. I heard him standing on the porch long after and I heard him walk to the end of the porch and crunch away into the snow. I heard him driving away.
Over dinner, Dolores looked over at me. "I heard that pickup truck of his driving up."
"I sent him away," I said. "I think he was drunk."
"That fool boy already out of prison, then? Didn't think he could make bail to save his life, and I half expected his momma to come calling to get the charges dropped. I knew he had a record before."
"He's been out, Dolores. He's been out since before you were put away." "That fool. That little fool."
"You want to watch the TV tonight?" said my mom. "Have you been watching the box, Dolores?"
"Your mother called me Dottie," she said. "I don't have Alzheimer's that bad, yet. I remember things. I remember plenty. I still got a mind like a trap. Things go up there they never get out. Girl, eat your cabbage. Don't worry about me. I'm just an old woman, and I'm tir
ed."
Momma poked at her food, but didn't eat it. She said she was on a diet, again. I figured that meant she had found a man to date her. I figured there'd be dating around here, then, and she'd be in and out, distracted, and maybe there'd be a man's name to learn in the morning and maybe not. It had been a while since there was a man around for breakfast. Anyway, I didn't think anything about what she was saying. My shunt was probably no good for years, but we never bothered to check in with the doctor about it. We couldn't afford to check these things unless they were breaking.
Big Dolores told me she was going to go get the goats in the barn and I could come if I wanted. She said it like it meant something, the way she said it. She said it like she didn't want to be alone in the night, didn't want to feel like a criminal locked up for being too poor to buy drugs legal so she has to go to the illegal kind, and shaking and sick and sitting out in the cold while strange men in uniforms treat her like a bear they caught in a dumpster. She looked at me with this big, quiet, expectant face. "You want to come out with me, Jujube? We can check the goats together. It'll be like when you were just a baby."
"I wish everyone would stop calling me Jujube. And Junebug and Girl and all those other stupid nicknames. They're not my name," I said. "I have a name and nobody ever uses it. I'm June. I'm June Jiminez Nguyen. I wish you could just call me my real name, for once."
"Okay, June Jiminez Nguyen," she said. "I'll start calling you that if it's what you want." I was pushing food around my plate. I was too sick and tired of waiting to eat. She left us, for the yard lights and the snow everywhere. "You're just sour 'cause your boyfriend got himself arrested stealing from us," said my mom. "Told you he was no good."
"He's not my boyfriend," I said. "I hate him, actually, and I don't know why everyone thinks we're anything. I want to kill him. I want to shoot him with a gun." I left in a huff. I went to my room.
I try to picture Dolores' life. I try to imagine it all laid out in a row, and I can't. I spent most of my life on the farm avoiding hers. She was a mystery, sitting on the porch and smoking while animals filled the old farmyard. She was out there when I got home from school. She was there, and we looked at each other over the wide expanse of time and emotion that divided us, because I resented being used for my blood, and I resented being forced to help her with the animals, and I resented being in that little town, way up in the north country where winters came like an annual disaster. How could I know what she felt for me? How could I know what she felt, when I was too immature to think of anyone but myself?
That night, Big Dolores went out to her goats in the barn. She chased them out into the freezing cold snow. She couldn't bear to hurt them. They were such strange, affectionate creatures, butting heads and rubbing up against her and sticking together no matter what. She didn't want them around her, right then. She tried to get the cats out, too, but that was next to impossible. There were so many of them, and they were hard to herd out into the cold, and she only had so much strength to finish the job after driving out the goats. She pulled the generator into the barn, shut the doors tight, closed all the windows, and flipped it on so the exhaust fumes would fill up the place. Gasoline ought to be illegal. I don't even know where she got that old generator. Some of her cats were in there with her, and she watched them falling down all over themselves, sinking into sleep before she did, but running from it and falling and tumbling like little clockwork dolls that wound down.
It was a long time before anything else happened. The goats were screaming from the cold, clattering to get into the barn and when that didn't work they came up to the house. They were jumping up to the windows, climbing all over the porch and making all kinds of a racket. Momma was getting ready for work. She saw them, and she was angry that Dolores had let them get out and up to the house like that, and then she realized Dolores wouldn't have done that. Dolores wouldn't have thrown her goats out into the night on purpose, and if they got out she'd be the first to chase after them. She grabbed a coat and ran to the barn.
Dolores was in there, with her cats, and the generator running hard, full steam. It had been running long enough and the barn was just small enough and anyway Dolores was in such poor health by then that it didn't take much.
It wasn't long after the funeral, once the goats had all been sold off and the cats taken away by the county, that Momma took me in to get the surgery done, and in the hospital waiting room while we were figuring out what we could afford and we hadn't said anything to anybody about the shunt in my arm yet, except to see if we could afford a consultation about it, and we saw Petey come through bleeding in the head and throwing up being helped along by a volunteer firefighter. He had been in an accident. He was screaming. There was a cop behind him, talking into a radio. My momma jumped up for him, because we knew him and he was hurt, and she told me to stay with him while she called the boy's mother. I was running with him, then. He reached out a hand to me from the wheelchair they threw him into and he asked me what the hell I was doing there, and I asked him what the hell was he doing there. He was choking up blood so he couldn't say anything else. He was stoned and laughing about it, and then he was bound to a gurney.
He shouted my nickname through the blood, " Jujube! " He said that he loved me.
"This your boyfriend, Jujube?" said the nurse, the doctor, the cop. "Is this your boyfriend?"
"He's just a friend," I said. "Can I sit with him until his family gets here?"
Nobody stopped me.
He was in an accident. He was drunk and stoned and driving on icy back roads and in an accident and the cop and fireman that found him ran him in here until he was healed enough to be arrested. He had to get more blood in him. He had an IV filling him up with blood. He was B positive. It said so on the bag. I knew my mom was going to find us in this little country hospital. I knew the police would come in soon, and they were waiting in the hall writing reports and calling the DA to coordinate the evidence. I knew the doctor would only be a moment, too.
As soon as we had a moment alone, I opened the shunt on my arm, and sat with my back to the door so I'd have a second if someone walked in to cover it with a sheet or something. I pulled the outflow from my arm and gently peeled back the IV on his. I could find a vein, couldn't I? I had it right there in front of me, in my naked arm my whole life.
"What...?" he mumbled something, but the painkillers had him mostly knocked out, the loss of blood and the marijuana and alcohol and head injury and wasted hours and wasted life. He was zoned out, stoned out, and nearly dead already.
"Big Dolores died because of you," I whispered. "You ratted her out and all of Drummondville. I know it. You sold her upriver so you could stay free as a bird."
I stuck the shuntline into his IV needle. I bled into him. I accepted no return line.
It didn't take long. A few minutes is all it takes to bleed out a pint. It doesn't take much to clot up things, and he had lost blood already, and had already had such damage done in the wreck. I slipped my shunt line back, and slipped it under my shirt. I carefully put his own IV line back in place, like nothing had happened.
"I didn't," he said, when I was doing it. "You hated her," he said. He was strapped down, and he was weak and no one would come if he shouted, if he could even man age to shout, and his body was turning purple like a bruise from where the blood was clotting along his arm. "You told me every day how much you hated her," he said.
I didn't say anything. It was almost done. I was staying to make sure he didn't push the button for the nurse to come. He never thought to push the button. I'm like my dad, and my granddad, deep down.
Big Dolores was mine to hate. She wasn't anyone else's. I would have opened my arm for her another twenty years if I had to. I would have done it forever.
I only had to do it that one last time, though, with Petey.
The nurses were there in minutes because of the way the monitors started beeping. I was already done, with my own shunt hidden up under my sleeve. They t
hought they had put the wrong type in, and they lost time trying to test his blood, trying to figure what his blood type was, while he was there, having a bad reaction, clotting up his arm, into his weak, wounded body, his eyes glazed over and getting pale and sicker by the second. They told me to step outside. I went without a word.
Nobody figured it out.
My momma believed me when I said I didn't want to have my own procedure in the same place he had died on account of bad blood. My type was rare enough I couldn't afford the risk.
I still have the shunt. I could never afford to take it out.
I work in a factory in Rockaway, like I said. I help assemble little recycled tablets from the line and box them into storage containers for the trucks to haul to the shipyard. I sit alone in a big room, surrounded by machines. At night, I sleep in a dormitory with seventeen other women, who each work on different parts of the line. I have to rinse out the shunt when I shower with them, and they ask me what it is, and I tell them my grandmother had Parkinson's, and I was her blood type, and if I save up enough I can get the shunt removed. That's all I say about it.
I wonder how many people out there got stories burning them up inside, anger and fear and lonely nights leaving me staring into the way the teeth of the springs grip the blue mattress over my head. The springs chew at the cheap mattress until it wears down. I wonder how many people are like that, never saying a thing. I wonder what Dolores would have done if I had gone out with her that night, to check the goats.
Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 Page 30