Frail

by Joan Frances Turner

  His teeth were clenched and he kept staring down at the short little blade like he dreamed it was last night’s carving knife, the table Billy’s flesh, like he could plunge it in and steal away blood and bubbling life and maybe that would give him somewhere to go, let him salvage something from all this. No chance. Nowhere. Not for anyone. His forehead furrowed beneath the tangled clumps of dark hair and I thought, looking at him, how sorrow is the twin face of rage.

  “Thank you for the note,” I said. No sugar, this time. Because I really had been thankful. “I wasn’t sure who sent it, just it probably wasn’t Janey.”

  The furrows eased, for a moment, his whole face striving toward good humor. “Be nice to Janey, and Don’ll leave you be. They hate each other.” He swept nicked potato eyes into the discard bag, using the side of his hand like a scraper. “Don and Billy, I mean. But not just them—the ones who were human, before, hate the ones who were undead. The ones who hate humans, who want to use us for what they can get, they hate the likes of Don and Lisa, as traitors . . . so, you know, it’s like it’s always been, since forever. It’s National Brotherhood Week around here every week, and everyone’s got an agenda.”

  Just like Phoebe said. This wasn’t like talking to her, though, how she kept trying to decide if I were whole, firm and clean to bite into, or rotten all inside; Stephen’s face was calm like he had no suspicions of me, no expectations, as if he expected nothing—what are you good for, anyway?—but that meant I owed him nothing. I was a free agent, here in this kitchen, nobody’s and nothing and going nowhere, exactly like everyone else. Exactly like him. Just the thought of that, the quiet relief of telling no lies because finally someone didn’t care to ask me any questions, despite his tense eye-lopping hands and sullen face it made me start relaxing, a little bit, for the first time since Don hustled us into his car.

  “Exes,” I said. “That’s what I call them.” I pushed the rotten onion bits into the bag. “The ones who changed, I mean.”

  He thought that over and then, to my surprise, he smiled. It didn’t magically transform him to handsome but it did give his plain piecemeal face a split-second, illusory semblance of harmony; his eyes, animated and intelligent, leapt up right along with his mouth. Gone, that little moment, as swiftly as it came. “Short and to the point,” he said. “I like it. We’re all pretty ex, though, these days. No idea what we are.”

  “I still know what I am,” I said. My voice was sharper than I’d meant it to be. “Maybe other humans started acting different, but I haven’t. I got through things, I got through the winter without—”

  To say a lie aloud is to confirm it. To be complicit. No. My tongue felt dry and thick, refusing to be party to any of that; how I acted, let’s never talk about how I acted. Ever. I was scrutinizing every little scratch and paint bubble in the tabletop, then I couldn’t stand it anymore and raised my head, looked into his eyes. None of Phoebe’s devouring curiosity, there; instead a flicker of something quick and unquantifiable, as if I were looking into a window and saw a hand twitching at a heavy curtain, exposing just the faintest, swiftest glimpse of what lay inside. Pale silvery wedge of wallpaper, flash of bright blue from flowers in a vase, a sliver of a hesitant, hidden face already retreating from view. A room I knew, from somewhere. A face I knew, someone I remembered arranging those flowers. Then, quicker than his smile, it vanished.

  “Our assignment,” he said, “is dinner for sixty. Every human gets rationed so many calories based on male, female, old, young, type of work crew—” He reached for the spiral-bound notebook, flipped it open. “Sometimes the exes bring us extra meat to cook, like last night, that makes it easier. You can help me plan the cooking for the week. I hope you’re good at arithmetic. Assume the average ex eats about quadruple their human equivalent, when you add it up. Bottomless pits, all of them. Assume if there’s any left for us, ever, that we’re lucky.”

  His voice was quiet and steady in its bitterness, a thread unwinding at its leisure from the spool, and despite it all it felt like just another day, just another thing, nobody here wanting anything of me but work. That suited me. His face wasn’t so ugly, actually, close up. Some of that had just been the distortion of flashlight shadows.

  “Those lights,” I said, nodding toward the industrial lamp. “They must take a lot of batteries.”

  “We’ve got more of those than we know what to do with.” He pulled the bag’s drawstring shut. “Batteries, I mean. And cheap plastic flashlights, and lighters. Every safe house, every gas station, every convenience store—”

  Lisa had been right, then. I smiled, thinking about it, I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t believed her. “So it’d be okay to waste some, sometimes. Maybe.”

  Stephen’s brows crooked in polite puzzlement. “Waste them on what?”

  I unzipped one of my LCS jacket pockets, pulled out the CDs I’d rescued from our supply carts: The Good Terrorist, Victims of the Dance. “If anyone’s got a CD player,” I said. “I thought . . .”

  He was silent for a minute, probably reflecting on how he could possibly have ended up sitting here listening to me whine for something so frivolous, and I was about to shove the CDs back in my pockets when he picked them both up, examining them, and shrugged.

  “Good luck competing with Al,” he said. “He’s all Charlie Parker and Coltrane, all the time. And he’s about six foot seven, so ask nice and be ready to run.”

  “Jazz is okay. I guess.” Stefanie Scholl, from The Good Terrorist, she talked about jazz in interviews all the time. Some of my magazines with her were in German so I couldn’t read them, but there’d be an ich bin blah blah Django Reinhardt achtung das ist Bill Evans und so weiter every now and then; I always wrote the names down. “I don’t know much about jazz.”

  “I don’t know anything about music at all.” He slid the CDs back to me. “But I never knew how to cook before, either.”

  He flipped the notebook to another page. Dinner for sixty. We’d worked it all out for about thirty-eight when the back door slammed open: the rest of the kitchen crew with rabbit carcasses, half-wild asparagus, buckets of lake and well water. Working until the sun came up, chopping, cooking, cleaning, writing it all down. Too busy to miss Lisa or anyone else.

  Too busy to think about what came before, what would come after, what might be waiting for me out there in the trees. Just another day, not talking about what happened.

  TEN

  People actually talked to me on the kitchen crew that night, not like with Kevin’s cleanup squad, and I learned everybody’s names. Al, he really was about six-seven—Stephen wasn’t kidding—shaved head, arms solid vein-blue from all the faded tattoos, had been in prison and I sure as hell wasn’t asking for what. He was one of the exes’ favorites, and they let him carry a gun; whenever he talked to Stephen his voice got cool, distant, exquisitely polite with dislike. Watching how Al looked at Stephen, the way Bonnie and Dan slid so carefully past him in the kitchens like they couldn’t stand any part of their bodies even fleetingly touching him, it was clear they just wanted to leave him behind. Let me, the new low woman, deal with him up close, if anybody had to.

  “You need to be a little careful around Stephen,” Bonnie warned me, that same night, taking me aside while Stephen and Emily snapped asparagus, peeled garlic dug up from someone’s defunct backyard garden, Al roasting rabbit out back. Already my mouth was watering. “He’s a decent enough kid, he’s just . . . he’s got some problems. That’s all.”

  “What do you mean, problems?”

  “Look, he’s a good kid. Like you. It’s just . . . hard to explain.” She tugged at her sweater, a thick pea-colored tangle of yarn. “So just don’t get too chummy, okay?”

  A good kid. I’m always a good kid, apparently, no matter what. That’s my job here. Like it’s Phoebe’s job to make everyone crazy.

  “Okay,” I said. She smiled, and grabbed for another box of instant mashed potatoes.

  So Stephen’s a good kid, I thought,
as I sat by one of the camp stoves waiting, waiting for the potato water to boil. A good kid, with some problems, that you need to be a little careful around, except we can’t explain why but, boy, if you knew? I can’t say it out loud, I just can’t, I won’t, but if you just knew?

  I think we’ll get along just fine. He and I. Maybe.

  It was two-thirty A.M. and I was alone in the kitchen with Bonnie, stacking up piles of plates while she wrestled with a tray loaded with cups. The back door swung open and there was Natalie, the girl who’d brought me my fork, my note, my new plum position; I smiled at her because she looked even more like she needed it and she shuffled her feet, twitched her mouth like she wanted to smile back but couldn’t work out just how. Bonnie put her tray down, strode toward Natalie in three quick steps and slapped her so hard she went staggering backward, clutching her face in both hands.

  “What the hell!” I shouted, and grabbed Bonnie’s arm, still clutching a plate in my other hand—I’d been trying to be careful, Al with his gun, Alice’s notebook full of our citations and demerits reported back to Billy, but neither of them were here and I couldn’t believe it. “What’d she ever do to—”

  “You’re an hour late,” Bonnie threw at Natalie from behind clenched teeth, shaking off my fingers like bits of lint and stepping closer so they were both nose to nose. “You were assigned here tonight, I told the goddamned gardening crew I needed you, where the hell’ve you been?”

  “I forgot,” Natalie said, in a still small voice, eyes full of the knowledge she’d never be allowed to make it right. Her whole face, not just the slapped cheek, had flared up in striations of angry pink. “I was helping cut back some dead plants and—”

  “And what, it was everyone else’s job to remind you, is that it?” Bonnie yanked at Natalie’s arm, rattled the wrist with a man’s salvaged wristwatch dangling from it like a bangle. “What the fuck are you even good for if you can’t turn your goddamned head and read the—”

  “Knock it off!” I grabbed Natalie’s shoulders and pulled her away, so fast Natalie let out a squeak of surprise and stumbled against me. “Fine, she forgot, she’s here now. Just leave it.”

  Bonnie shook her head in disgust. Her own face, as she swiveled round to glare at me, was flushed the same deep pink as Natalie’s. “You give the orders here now, huh? Is that it?”

  Another fight, just like at that dinner. I’m not having another goddamned fight. I can’t take it tonight. “She’s here to help with dinner,” I pointed out, calm as I could. Let her try to slap me, I’ve had worse. “Not to stand around doing nothing but get yelled at. Right? You want Billy to find out we’re all standing around right now? Doing nothing? When he’s hungry?”

  Silence. Bonnie looked from me to Natalie and back again, still whistling useless anger from between her teeth. Then she glanced down, at Natalie’s big square-faced gunmetal watch with its lit-up second hand ticking a tinny pulse, and let out a long breath.

  “Potatoes,” she said to Natalie, pointing at a box of instant flakes sitting open on the kitchen table. “Get some water boiling.”

  She turned her back on both of us, started stacking cups again like nothing had happened. As she turned her gaze away Natalie’s whole face contorted into a sudden, silent rictus of misery, her shoulders shuddering holding back the need to break down and cry; then she swallowed hard, tucked the potato box like a baby into her arms and headed out.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she whispered in my ear as she passed me. “You’ll get everything I get, for that. You shouldn’t.”

  Fine, I get what she gets. I didn’t care. She glanced back at me as she slipped through the door and her eyes, tears or no, were full of surprise and gratitude.

  Bonnie and I kept working side by side, not looking at each other, the air heavy with our dislike. Then the door swung open again and Lisa was there, smiling, Naomi trailing behind her like a little thundercloud after the sunlight. I smiled at Naomi and she hid her face behind her hand. Lisa barely seemed to notice, stroking Naomi’s hair as she motioned me out the door. Bonnie, wrestling with a tray loaded with cups, actually looked impatient when I hesitated.

  “Well, go on then!” she said, and gave Lisa this respectful little head-duck like some English servant bobbing a curtsey. “Go with her. Crew or no crew, you don’t forget who you belong to.”

  Lisa’s smile faded a little, hearing that, but she led me and Naomi down the back steps and past the array of camp stoves, into a quiet front yard halfway down Illinois. Naomi kept her head lowered as we walked, shuffling through the violet-studded grass clutching her fists together and mumbling to herself like she was saying grace. A big, heavy-footed possum suddenly shot across our path and under a rusting Pontiac, its skittering toes like long, unkempt anemic fingernails, and she didn’t even flinch.

  “I told Billy to leave you the hell alone,” Lisa said. She paced up and down in front of another cluster of barbecue grills, her ponytail flopping back and forth across her shoulder. “You could say we had words. And fists. And teeth. Dear Christ, I needed that.” She shook her hair back and actually laughed, a gruff little bark of satisfaction, livid moonlit ghosts of bruises fading from her throat even as we spoke like quickly drying water stains. “I needed it so badly and I didn’t even know it—I shouldn’t tell you that, you’ll think I wanted to hurt you, but I didn’t. I just, you’re all right now, in the kitchens? They’re treating you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, my voice receding and backing away. I could tell she heard it because she wilted almost instantly, all her fighttriumph spoiled, and gazed down at the dandelions like Naomi.

  “I can’t help it,” she muttered. She put a gentle hand to Naomi’s head; Naomi pulled away and squatted down, yanking viciously at the weeds. “I really can’t. I needed it. All right?”

  “I didn’t ask you to apologize for anything.” I wanted to plunk down next to Naomi, go to work on them myself. The old game we used to play in elementary school, clutching a plucked dandelion in one hand and then decapitating it with a casual thumb: Soldier got a zombie and the head popped off! That’s me, now, and Naomi. Shaggy-headed, thin-necked weeds. “Aren’t you in trouble now? For fighting him? And does that mean I’m in trouble?”

  Lisa hesitated.

  “That’s the thing, Amy,” she said. She glanced at Naomi, bent over a half-denuded patch of earth and still pulling, and then back at me. “The kitchen crew, he says it right out, ‘Those are the ones I don’t want touched.’ And now you’re on it. That was his idea, not mine.” She lowered her voice, even though Naomi was oblivious. “I don’t have any idea why, and nobody’s talking.”

  I shook my head in confusion. Stephen, a favorite? Billy loathed him. He loathed all of us. “Do you think we’re, you know—food? Maybe?”

  My hands clutched up tense, asking that, like they were ripping the blossoms from flowers. All of Phoebe’s hollow Plasticine reassurances, they didn’t amount to shit. Lisa took my fingers in hers, gently straightening them.

  “If I thought that,” she said, with a quiet ferocity, “we wouldn’t be standing here right now. All right?”

  “All right,” I said. Though it still wasn’t.

  “I’d know by now, believe me. Fights or no fights they run in gangs, like the zombies all used to do, they’re gang animals, pack animals, and Billy’s the head of the pack. Him and Mags. And they don’t eat your kind, so nobody else does either. They’re a lot more hipped on stray dogs.”

  I imagined Billy, Don, the rest of them sniffing out that lamp-eyed, fetid thing following me, tearing it limb from limb. They couldn’t, it wasn’t a real dog. Not like the one in Leyton.

  “It’s okay in the kitchens,” I told her. “They let us listen to music.”

  Stray dogs. I couldn’t stop picturing it, the horrible thing that had trailed and tracked me two weeks running curled up quiet and dead like a car-struck badger, torn apart by famished exhands and ex-mouths. You can’t have that, I
thought, a flash of feeling coming out of nowhere and connected to nothing. It’s mine.

  What the hell was wrong with me?

  “What does Billy want with us?” I asked. “With me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Lisa reached out again, tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “Do we stay and try to find out?”

  “Does she have anything to say to you?” I nodded toward Naomi. “Or anyone?”

  Lisa shrugged. “She’ll get there.”

  Ye of great faith. Naomi had abandoned her weeds and was rocking back and forth where she sat, humming at the sky, her fingers streaked with fresh wet smears of green and dandelion yellow. Sticky crayon colors. She got up on her feet and came toward us.

  “I think we stay,” I said.

  “I think so too.”

  Naomi looked from Lisa to me, and back, and frowned.

  “Can I stay?” she asked.

  Her voice was hoarse, like she hadn’t spoken in days. Still worn out from all that crying.

  “Of course,” Lisa said, and put an arm around her. She shied from the touch, ducking neatly down and away, but stayed by Lisa’s side with a cheek pressed to her thigh.

  “I should get back to work,” I told Lisa. “It doesn’t look right otherwise. If everyone’s listening to you, you should put in a word for Natalie. That gofer girl with the dark hair and the striped shirt. Everyone hates her, and I don’t know why—”

  “Natalie’s dead,” said Naomi.

  Lisa turned toward her, gazing down at her so intently that Naomi ducked her head again.

  “Who’s been saying that?” Lisa asked, quietly. “She’s not one of my kind, Naomi, she’s human just like you.” Silence. “Has someone been saying they’ll hurt her? Is that what—”

  “Nobody’s going to hurt her,” Naomi muttered, that singsong impatience of kids who can’t fathom you don’t speak their home planet’s language. “I told you, they can’t hurt her. She’s already dead. The Scissor Men got her. They snipped her all in pieces.”