The Scavengers

by Michael Perry

  “What do you mean, Ma?”

  “I . . . I . . .” She’s looking at the mirror again.

  “Ma! Have they hurt you?”

  “Oh, no, Maggie. Quite the opposite. I have been treated very well. I have a room of my own, Maggie. A room with a window. Books on a shelf, and Earl Grey tea whenever I wish, and I never was happy OutBubble, and I . . . and . . . and . . .” She is speaking rapidly. Too rapidly, as if she’s trying to head me off, keep me from going down some dangerous road. All the while she is still clutching at my hands, squeezing and unsqueezing them as if somehow this will keep her distracted from the trouble surrounding us. “And now that you’re here, you should stay. You’re . . . you’re all I have.”

  “But what about our family, Ma?”

  “We have no more family, Maggie!” Ma says this so sharply and squeezes my hand so tightly that I cry out and jump back, but she clings to my hands even tighter, and her fingers are clutching at mine.

  “Maggie, your father abandoned us! And Henry . . . Henry . . .” She is sobbing now, terrible sobs, sobs that shake her whole body. I have called Henry “Dookie” so long it takes me a second to realize she is referring to my little snot flicker of a brother.

  “Dad didn’t abandon us, Ma! There were things . . . things he couldn’t . . .” I keep looking at that mirror. I don’t know yet how much I should say.

  “No, Maggie, no. Your father abandoned us. That night, before the attack, we had a terrible fight about him being gone all the time. He took his pack and said he was heading for the northern territories and I’d never see him again. For all I know he’s . . . he’s dead.”

  I know this can’t be true. Ma and Dad got grumpy with each other, but I never once heard Dad raise his voice against Ma. And Ma knew what Dad was doing those nights when he was out wandering. Suddenly, I realize: someone is listening and Ma is trying to protect Dad by throwing them off his trail.

  “Ma, he was . . .”

  “Oh, Maggie, there is so much you don’t know.”

  “But, Ma, I . . .”

  “And after losing Henry . . . oh, Maggie, when I saw them beat Henry and drop him lifeless to the ground . . .”

  “But, Ma, they didn’t kill Doo . . . Henry. Henry’s alive! I gave him a noogie just last week!”

  Ma’s eyes fly open, and her sobbing stops. “But I saw them . . . with their clubs . . . he fell . . . I knew . . .”

  She tells me the story now, how she was up late worrying about Dad and trying to keep her mind occupied reading Little House on the Prairie by candlelight and worrying about Dad yet again when the attackers came screeching around the shack, how she knew immediately they weren’t GreyDevils because their voices weren’t right and at that hour any real GreyDevil would be at the bonfires drinking PartsWash. And then she knew for sure when they broke through the door because despite their rags and dirty faces, they moved like healthy men and their breath didn’t smell like spoiled turpentine, their yellow eyes were too yellow, and then if there was any doubt remaining, they were all wearing headlamps and carrying weapons. She says the lights were blinding as two of the invaders grabbed and held her while the others smashed the chicken coop and tore up the house and stomped the Falcon and went into the root cellar looking for Dad. The men kept threatening Ma and demanding to know where Dad was, and she kept telling them she didn’t know, which was true. Dookie kept running in circles, hollering “Shibby-shibby-shibby . . .” Then he grabbed Ma and tried to pull her away from the men. One of them raised a club and hit Dookie in the head and he crumpled to the ground. She tried to go to Dookie, but the men grabbed her tightly and hustled her away. The last thing she saw, she says, was Dookie’s little body lying on the ground, lit by the flash of a headlamp. Then she was dragged off into the night.

  “Ma . . . Dookie . . . Henry . . . he survived! I found him in the roots of the Shelter Tree. Where he used to hide out and wait to scare me. He must have come to long enough to crawl in there.”

  “He’s alive?” says Ma, as if she didn’t hear me the first time.

  “Alive, Ma. And he needs you.” I leave it at that. I don’t tell her about the seizure.

  She is quiet now, squeezing her eyes against tears that sneak out anyway.

  “They will never let me go.”

  I shoot a glance at the mirror. Wondering who’s back there.

  “They want your father.”

  “I know, Ma. That’s why I’m here.”

  The light in the room changes, and as if someone has thrown a switch—as someone has—the mirrored wall becomes a window.

  And behind the window are two men.

  48

  THE TWO MEN ARE SEPARATED BY A WALL, ALTHOUGH THERE IS A window in the wall that allows them to see each other. The first man is a skinny fellow with skin so pale and limp it reminds me of wilted lettuce. He is standing in a clean white room the same as ours.

  The second man is big. Big as Tilapia Tom, plus a fat hog’s worth of blubber. His face is creased and oily, like a greased prune with eyeballs. His hair is thick and black. He’s wearing a suit and a tie. They’re tight around his neck and belly. He’s sitting behind a massive wooden desk that looks as if it was built just so he could pound his fist on it. Everything around him is a cluttered mess. There are shelves and cubbies on every wall, and every available surface is crammed with cast iron toys and tin soldiers and miniature steam engines and wooden-handled oddments and a hundred other things I don’t recognize, every single one of them old. The walls are covered with rusty advertising signs and yellowed circus posters and framed postcards and a blinking neon sign that says “BEER.”

  And then, on the front corner of his desk, beside a stack of papers, I spot something that drops my jawbone to my toenails.

  Porky Pig.

  My Porky Pig. The one I dug up in Goldmine Gully. I recognize it by the rust spot right where its belly button should be.

  The Fat Man—that’s the name I decide to give him—must have seen my eyes bulge, because he chuckles evilly and picks up the statue.

  “Nice, isn’t it?” he says, waggling the little pig at me. His voice is coming through a speaker hidden in the ceiling.

  I am trying to scowl at him and look tough, but he can pretty easily see that I am shocked and perplexed.

  “I like old things,” says the Fat Man, using a corner of his shirtsleeve to polish Porky’s cap. “This little guy here, he reminds me of the old days, when I was a little boy, eating macaroni and cheese and watching cartoons on TV. Things were so simple then.”

  He looks at the statue and sighs. “I miss the old days . . . so I collect them. Well, I have people collect them for me.

  “These things,” he continues, waving his hand at all the objects surrounding him, “they tell me stories.”

  “Whatever,” I said, trying to be cool again.

  “They take me on adventures,” he says.

  I roll my eyes, even though I’m suddenly remembering how I felt when I held Porky that day under the Shelter Tree. Like I was being transported somewhere else also.

  “And Porky here, Porky told me the best story of all.”

  “Sounds like you should get out more,” I say. The Fat Man doesn’t even blink. There is something about him that is familiar.

  “This pig told me how to find your father.”

  It’s all I can do to keep my mouth from dropping open again.

  “I have been hunting for your father for a long, long time. Ever since he pulled the red balloon trick, as a matter of fact. He’s a sneaky one.”

  Then he adds, “And a smart one.”

  For the first time since I don’t remember when, I feel a little bit proud of my dad.

  “Tough, too. Tearing that tracker out of his face. That took some guts.” Then he looks at Ma. “Of course he had some help . . .”

  Ma lowers her eyes.

  “Yes, your father was quite a man,” says the Fat Man. “And he was—is—quite a valuable man. The fact is,
by running away, he stole from us.”

  “Couldn’t have happened to nicer people,” I say. I’m still trying to figure out why he looks familiar.

  The Fat Man ignores me. “We had no choice but to pursue him. We knew he had to be out there. We had agents in the field, and eyes in the sky, but it’s a gigantic country, and that balloon trick and new car had given him a head start. A week passed before we found the car. Half of that week it had rained, so there were no tracks or scent remaining.

  “Pretty much it was a clean getaway.”

  The Fat Man cradles Porky in his hands, as gently as if he were holding a kitten. “Weeks became months, months became years. But we kept looking. We knew he needed URCorn. And we knew that sooner or later, that would lead us to him.”

  “And then one day one of my OutBubble collectors brought me this talking pig.”

  “That pig doesn’t talk, you grease chomper,” I say.

  “Maggie!” says Ma, but I’m not gonna sit here all polite, no matter how much everything he is saying has knocked me sideways. I’m not gonna sit here like I’m one of Daniel Beard’s pretty-store-bought-bow girls. I need to be Ford Falcon.

  “It’s just a dumb piggy bank. Look at the slot.”

  “Oh, I know about the slot,” says the Fat Man, ignoring my attitude. He places Porky in the center of his desk now and sits straighter in his chair, like a professor about to deliver a lecture. Waving his hand at the objects surrounding him, he says, “Before any one of these items can be brought UnderBubble, they have to be Steri-Scanned, to make sure we don’t admit any unexpected contaminants. Some of us UnderBubble are germophobic weaklings.” At this he rolls his eyes and points his thumb at the wall on the other side of which the man with skin like wilted lettuce is standing.

  “HEY!” says Lettuce Face, with a flouncy little huff.

  The Fat Man chuckles. “And when we put Porky here through the Steri-Scan, well, we got a surprise: the sensors discovered traces of an organic substance not usually found on the inside of piggy banks—human blood.”

  I recall the stab of pain when I reached for the pig and sliced my finger on the glass. I remember wiping my blood from the pig but not wanting to scrub it too hard. I remember my blood seeping into the cracks and the coin slot.

  “Naturally, the Steri-Scan includes a DNA analysis and database cross-check. Imagine my surprise when it came back as a relative match to the man we’d been hunting for so long—your father.”

  Once again, I find myself trying to keep my chin off the ground.

  “We knew the scientist we were hunting had children—and the blood on this pig came from one of them. We could then assume wherever the child was—alive or dead, it was blood after all—the father would be nearby. The collector who brought me the pig was quite happy to tell me where he obtained it. I then sent some of my people to visit the proprietor, and after a brief conversation he quite willingly told us about the young girl who brought in the pig.”

  Mad Mike! He sold me out!

  “After that, it was just a matter of waiting until the next time you came to town in that ridiculous wagon with that ridiculous old man. Our undercover people then followed you back, cased your place, and identified your father.”

  I think of the GreyDevil I saw the night I was hiking down to Toad and Arlinda’s. No wonder it was so far up the ridge. Those too-yellow eyes, and the way it ran instead of shuffled. Just as Dad and I suspected, it wasn’t a real GreyDevil. It was a spy.

  “Pretty smart,” I say, grudgingly. “But not too smart, because instead of capturing the escaped scientist, your goons beat up my little brother and kidnapped my mom.”

  “IDIOTS!” roars the Fat Man, slamming his fist against the desk so powerfully that Porky gives a little hop. “Undertrained governmental laze-abouts!” He pokes his thumb in the direction of Lettuce Face. “Dinglefritz over here was in such a rush to make the capture that he gave the go-ahead before we confirmed that your father was actually in the shack that night.”

  “But-but-but . . . !” Lettuce Face is dancing in frustration. “We couldn’t wait! Euro-Cornsortium . . . Pharmo-Fos . . . the Anti-Gen Collective . . . if they ever get the secret . . . we could not wait!”

  “SHUT IT!” explodes the Fat Man.

  And in that instant I remember the photograph from the newspaper article about the Bubbling. The one with the two politicians shaking hands with the fat man in the business suit. That’s him! Older and a hundred pounds heavier, but it’s him. And Lettuce Face must be one of the politicians.

  I’ll say this for Lettuce Face: he may look creepy, but he looks like he has aged better than the Fat Man.

  49

  INSTEAD OF SHUTTING IT, LETTUCE FACE CHANGES THE SUBJECT.

  “So . . . ,” he says, shifting his gaze from me to Ma. “This is your mommy.” He’s as slimy as a snail’s belly.

  Just the way he says “mommy” makes me want to drive my fist through that glass and into his nose, his nose that looks as thin as a slice of cucumber. Two minutes I’ve known this creep and already I dream of how his proboscis will feel when it folds over beneath my knuckles.

  When that mirror wall first flipped, Ma jumped like she’d been sitting on an electric wire. Even now she is darting her eyes back and forth from the skinny man to me, her face tight with fear. As for me, I just glare right back at him. Give him my best Ford Falcon stare, like my gaze could melt the glass.

  “My ma, yeah,” I say, standing up and squaring my shoulders. I’m trying to look tough, and in some ways I am, but it suddenly occurs to me that knowing how to spear a solar bear or run a Whomper-Zooka won’t do me much good in this place.

  “You miss your mommy?” Mr. Lettuce Face is wearing what looks like an exercise suit made of blue tissue paper. His skin is so pale I swear I can see watery pink blood pulsing beneath it. His eyes are transparently blue, and his hair looks like a patch of thin weeds. When he talks he hitches his hips to one side, cupping his elbow in one palm and using the fingers of his other hand to tap his chin between smart-aleck comments.

  I take two steps toward the window. “I’m here to take her home.”

  Lettuce Face scrunches up his face and makes a high, vibrating sound.

  “E-e-e-e-e-e H-e-e-e-e-e . . .” It sounds like he’s having a sneezy little asthma attack or gagging on a warbler. Then I realize this is just his way of giggling.

  “Get to it,” growls the Fat Man from the other side of the divider. Lettuce Face is still giggling. “NOW!” says the Fat Man.

  Lettuce Face stops giggling and addresses me again.

  “We would loooooove to reunite you with your mother permanently.”

  He is actually rubbing his veiny hands together when he says this.

  “But?” I know there’s a catch and I’m not giving him the satisfaction of hope.

  “But we need something first.”

  “Well, good luck with that. I can offer you exactly one stinking dead solar bear, but yer gonna have to fetch it yourself.”

  The way Lettuce Face pinches his lips together, you’d think some of that solar bear stink made its way into his carefully sealed cubicle.

  “The price for your mother is . . . E-e-e-e-h-e-e . . . it’s . . . e-e-e . . .”

  “WE WANT YER OLD MAN!” bellows the Fat Man.

  “You give me Ma first,” I say. “Then we’ll talk.”

  “You want yer ma back, you bring in yer old man!”

  “You heard what Ma said. He’s gone. I have no idea . . .”

  “LIAR!” screams Lettuce Face. Then he giggles. He really is full-time creepy. “You are correct. After the attack, he did disappear again. But you were kind enough to capture him for us . . . again, thank you very much. And you kept him in the pig shed.”

  “I . . . you . . . how?” I hate myself for letting them know I’m flabbergasted, but this time I can’t help it: my mouth has fallen into full flytrap mode.

  Lettuce Face changes the subject. “You know, yo
u had a na-a-asty cut on your head when you came in here.” He acts like he cares, but there’s a sneer in there.

  “Yah, well you shoulda seen the solar bear,” I say.

  “Oh, I’m sure it was all very entertaining,” says Lettuce Face, “but when you grabbed your head earlier, what did you notice?”

  I feel around up there with my fingers again, then, grudgingly, say, “Um, it’s pretty much healed.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Lettuce Face, like some simpering night nurse. “Yes, our surgeons are magnificent. They removed the amateur embroidery, cleaned up the wound properly, probably saved you from a nasty brain infection—assuming there’s a brain in there—and then applied some CellGen, a terrific CornVivia product that generates new skin cells in under twenty-four hours.”

  I put my hand up to the shaved spot again. Nothing but that little ridge, and even that feels smoother than when I first checked it.

  “Personally, I wish they would have shaved off all of that nasty hair, but then we were interested in keeping you alive, not clean.” He studies me through the glass a moment and then scrunches his celery-stick nose again.

  “TELL HER,” bellows the Fat Man. I get the feeling that if it wasn’t for the wall separating them, Mr. Lettuce Face would be Mr. Limp Neck.

  “While we were fixing your head, we gave you a little something for the pain.”

  That explains why I don’t remember anything between the paddy wagon and waking up to see Ma.

  Lettuce Face chuckles again. It’s like a lizard giggling. “It made you woozy. You talked a lot of useless gibberish.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “That’s kinda your department.”

  “Oh, you’re a rude one,” says Lettuce Face, but he’s still lizard giggling. “But among all the nonsense you kept saying you hoped a Toad would feed the pigs. And then you’d wink at us.”

  Oops.

  “Of course we now know of your neighbors Toad and Arlinda Hopper. And that they have a shed where they keep pigs . . . and—sometimes—your father.”