The Isle of Youth: Stories

by Laura van Den Berg

  The winter the girls turned eighteen, everything changed. A notice came in the mail. No one had paid taxes on the farm in decades and now the government was saying it owned the land. Her father tore up the first notice, because he didn’t believe in taxes, but they kept coming. Dana saw the envelopes stamped with URGENT that he brought home from the P.O. Soon they had just sixty days to pay. That was when their training became serious. They had target practice daily. They had drills where they would run along the perimeter of the property, rifles in hand. Even Pinky had to come. He always lagged behind the girls. Dana worried about him slipping on the ice and shooting himself in the foot. They would go out bundled in parkas and leather gloves and hunting caps, their breath making white ghosts in the air. After the first hour her arms would burn from the weight of the gun, but she would keep going. They were given a pair of binoculars and told to look out for strangers. Every night their father waited up in the kitchen for something to happen, for someone to come. Every night they recited a prayer that was meant for the eve of battle: His days are as a shadow that passeth away / touch the mountains, and they shall smoke / Cast forth lightning, and scatter them. During a snowstorm, Dana said she didn’t see how anyone from the government could find them in this weather, and her father pointed out that snowfall could give the enemy perfect cover. That night, he asked her to wait up with him. He kept opening the front door and looking outside. Snow gusted into the house and padded the hallway with white. Flecks of ice got stuck in his dark eyebrows and hair. He showed her a pamphlet newspaper called The Embassy of Heaven, which had a Bible quote on the cover: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.” He said he had been writing to the newspaper and asking for help.

  “Help with what?” They were sitting at the kitchen table. A rifle lay across his lap. Last week he’d torn out the landline and now a bundle of red and green wires dangled from the kitchen wall. They had a radio that got two stations, local news and gospel music; in the background she could hear the drone of an organ. She kept telling herself that the tax notices and her father’s new habits would all pass eventually, like a hunting season.

  “With the soul of this land,” he told her. “With the soul of this family.”

  They’d turned the generator off for the night and the kitchen was cold. Dana had wrapped herself in a wool blanket. The room was lit by an oil lamp. In the half-dark, she could see how much her father’s face had changed. The crescents under his eyes had hollowed out; his pupils looked darker, his cheekbones and chin sharper. His skin carried the sheen of a light sweat, even though it was freezing outside. The surface was falling away. She was finally seeing what lay beneath.

  No one from the bank or the government ever came to Elijah. The snow kept falling. The river stayed frozen. By February the notices had stopped appearing in the mail. It seemed they had been forgotten. Still things did not go back to the way they were before. Dana’s father thought it was a trick. He started working on a secret project in the barn. His face kept changing. At night she could hear her parents arguing and sometimes Dana would find her mother crying as she collected eggs from the chicken coop or squeezed milk from the cow. Both the mothers seemed exhausted by the vigilance they’d been required to keep. They lost the energy for homeschooling. When they gave the children their schoolbooks and sent them away, Dana’s father didn’t notice.

  Of course, the children weren’t really children anymore. There was only so much time they could spend shooting skeet and patrolling the property and flipping through musty textbooks. The idle time sparked a curiosity they had never felt before; it was as though they had each swallowed an ember and now it sat simmering in their stomachs. One afternoon Cora had this idea to wait on the road for a car to pass. They had some sense of what the outside world was like. They had accompanied Dana’s father on trips to the farm store and the P.O. in West Plains. Once a month they went with the mothers to Fairfield’s Discount Grocery, just a few miles down the road in Caulfield. Every fall they drove to visit Dana’s grandparents, who had a computer and a TV, in Arkansas. But they had never done anything on their own, just the four of them.

  After an hour of waiting, a truck rolled by and they hitched a ride to Miller’s One Stop in Tecumseh. They wandered the dusty gas station aisles. Under the glare of fluorescent lights, Dana stared at the rows of Cokes and the freezer full of ice-cream sandwiches. Before they hitched a ride back, Cora pocketed a tube of Chapstick and a plastic comb. At home, they mashed the Chapstick into Pinky’s hair and then combed it so it stood upright.

  On another outing, they discovered that, five miles beyond the gas station, there was a town with a movie theater and a liquor store. The theater had an old-fashioned marquee and two screens. One of the films was always R-rated. The girls started talking the liquor store owner into selling them cigarettes; Pinky was the lookout. They would smoke behind the store and then toss the butts into a field. Once, they let Pinky smoke. He coughed and dropped the cigarette and Cora flicked his ear. They were always back well before dark. Their parents didn’t seem to know they’d been gone, or catch the strange smells they brought home. The farm was more than two hundred acres, and Dana figured they thought their children were out on the land, like they’d always been. But their children were learning quickly. They were learning that the outside world and the pleasures it held weren’t so bad. They were learning that they had never really believed in God; they had only ever believed in fear.

  After they stole a map of American highways from the gas station, they spent hours sitting on the floor of Pinky and Dana’s room, tracing the lines out to California and Oregon and Florida.

  “Here.” Cora lay on her side and pointed at San Luis. She had been eating sugar cubes from a cardboard box and her fingertip glistened. “That’s where we should go.”

  Jackie was interested in traveling south, to New Orleans or Fort Lauderdale, but Cora said those places were too hot. Dana was intrigued by the small patchwork of northern states. They had studied geography during homeschooling, but now they were looking at the map in an entirely new light, as being full of places they might one day go.

  “Too cold,” Cora said when Dana touched the hook of land extending out of Massachusetts.

  “Do you promise to take me with you?” Pinky asked. He didn’t look his age, thirteen. He could have passed for ten or eleven. He reminded Dana of a rabbit; he had the same nervous nature and quick-beating heart. He never requested any particular place. He just wanted to make sure he wasn’t left behind.

  “We’ll see.” Cora ran her finger along the edge of California.

  “Of course we’ll take you,” Dana said. He wasn’t cut out for life in Elijah. It was too rugged, with the target practice and the long winters and the dead animals. She didn’t yet know that he would be even more ill-prepared for the life she and her cousins would choose.

  One night, in the early spring, they packed a single suitcase, hitched a ride to West Plains, and kept going. That was six months ago. Their parents never came looking for them, or if they did, they must not have looked very hard. Maybe they thought their children had fallen in with the government or the devil and were beyond hope. Or maybe they just didn’t know how to search.

  At first Dana thought leaving Elijah meant getting away from how things were on the farm, but now she thinks the past is like the hand of God, or what she imagines the hand of God would be like if God were real: it can turn you in directions you don’t want to be turned in. They are still in a battle with the laws of the land. The laws that say they shouldn’t steal or point guns at people. And she feels the same resistance to these laws that her father must have felt toward paying taxes. Why not do these things? she found herself thinking. Who is going to stop us?

  Their first robbery was at a feed-and-grain store. They wanted money to buy a used car. It was so simple. They had stolen a shotgun from the bed of a truck they’d hitched in. All they had to do was walk inside. Dana told the teenage boy b
ehind the counter to empty his register because that was a line she’d heard in one of those R-rated movies. She called him a cocksucker, too, since criminals seemed to say that all the time and she wanted him to know that she was to be taken seriously.

  The boy gave them everything he had. Feed-and-grain stores aren’t used to being robbed.

  3.

  The night before they hit the bank, Pinky tests his robot in the parking lot. Dana is the only one interested enough to watch. The floodlights are on; tiny bugs hover around the glow. The robot is covered in a pillowcase. It stands on the black asphalt like a ghost. Dana is smoking one of Jackie’s cigarettes. She doesn’t smoke much anymore, but it’s the night before a job and that always makes her nervous. Once the thing is started, there’s no sense in worrying because it’s done, it’s over. You can’t rewind. But being on the edge, that’s the hardest part. It’s like standing in front of a burning building and knowing that it won’t be long before you have to walk inside.

  She sits on the ground and watches her brother peel away the pillowcase. The robot looks like a kid’s science project. It has a round silver head and black buttons for eyes, an economy-size tomato soup can for a body, and large plastic suction cups for feet. It doesn’t have any arms. Dana realizes that, for some reason, whenever she thinks of a robot, the first thing that comes into her mind are its arms.

  “What do you think?” Pinky says.

  “Nice work.” Dana flicks the cigarette into the lot.

  He tweaks some wires and the robot starts lurching in Dana’s direction. It squeaks and sighs. A suction cup slips forward. It’s working! She can’t believe it. She stands up and begins to applaud. She feels proud of her brother for building something. For finding a way to escape his circumstances.

  The robot takes one full step before toppling to the ground. The eyes pop off and slide under a car. The head gets dented. Pinky rights it and adjusts the wires, but he can’t bring it back to life. Dana stops clapping. She sits down on the sidewalk.

  He carries the robot over to her. “Do you want to hold it?”

  “Sure.” She holds it away from herself. It’s surprisingly light.

  “On TV people build robots that can talk.” Pinky licks his lips.

  “It probably takes a lot of practice,” she says.

  An old woman with flame-red hair shuffles past and disappears into a motel room. Above them Dana hears slamming doors.

  “I don’t want to leave,” Pinky says. “I want to stay here and keep practicing.”

  “You want to stay in Galesburg?”

  Pinky tells her that whenever they leave a place, he worries they won’t make it to the next town. He worries the car will break down and no one will give them a ride and they’ll starve to death or get heatstroke or something equally horrible. He’s breathless. His eyes are glassy. She pictures his rabbit heart pulsing under his ribs. Probably leaving him in Galesburg would be the best thing for him, though she knows she could never do such a thing. She was the one who took him away from the farm and now she has to live with the consequences.

  She gives the robot back to him. She doesn’t tell him that if they die, it won’t be from starving to death in their car. Instead she says everything is going to be fine, just like she used to in Elijah. No one is going to die. Soon he’ll have all the time in the world to build a new robot.

  “Does this one have a name?” she asks.

  “Donald.” He squeezes the robot’s metal stomach and asks Dana what she thought their father was building in the barn.

  Dana shrugs. She’s never given much thought to what he was doing. She just remembers looking out her window and seeing him trudge into the mouth of the barn at dawn and not emerging until after dark. His skin would be caked in dust, straw caught in his hair. But mainly she had been preoccupied with figuring out how to live her own life, with how to spend her time. Dana wonders if her father is still working on his project in the barn, whatever it was. She imagines going back to Elijah one day and finding him a shrunken old man, and feels an ache shoot through her chest.

  “I snuck in there once and watched him.” Pinky describes pliers and cords and strips of metal. He talks about smelling smoke and seeing tiny silver sparks. “I think he was building a robot. I think that’s what he wanted to do.”

  Dana looks at her brother and feels woozy. She never should have taken him along. It was a game at first, but now it’s something much more serious and he is becoming an attachment she doesn’t need.

  “You know what they say in the movies?” she asks him.

  “What?”

  “They say you have to be cool.” She can see a man in a ponytail delivering the line, but can’t remember which movie it’s from.

  “Okay.” He’s staring at the ground. She can tell she’s not getting through.

  “Say it to me.”

  He keeps hugging the robot. In his arms it looks like a heap of trash. It’s only recently occurred to Dana that some people might call what she did—taking her brother away from their parents—kidnapping.

  “Be cool,” he tells her without looking up.

  “You got it,” she says.

  4.

  Dana was questioned by the police only once. It didn’t have anything to do with the Gorillas. Rather, she was a witness to a hit-and-run. This was two months ago, in Jefferson City. She had just walked out of a bank the Gorillas were casing and was waiting to cross the street. A car ran a red light and struck a girl on a bicycle. The girl was dead by the time the ambulance came. Dana could remember the twisted handlebars and the crushed bell. She could remember the peculiar angle of the girl’s torso and her open eyes. Her lips were parted. Her teeth were straight and white. She was still wearing her helmet. She looked like a life-size doll someone had left in the street. Pedestrians gathered. The police were called. Dana tried to slip away, but someone identified her as a witness and she was taken down to the station. She got to ride up front with the officer. She wondered what Cora or Jackie would think if they saw her, if they would think she had turned on them.

  At the station, the officer brought her a cup of coffee. He was handsome, with his broad shoulders and gelled hair. So this is the lair of the enemy, Dana thought as they settled into an interrogation room. She held the warm foam cup with both hands. If only this officer knew what she had done, what she was going to do, she would not be answering questions over coffee. There would be handcuffs and threats. She figured that one day he would see her face on the news and feel like a dolt.

  He asked her the usual questions: what she’d seen, if the light had been red, if she’d gotten a look at the driver, if she remembered the license plate. She answered honestly. She hadn’t seen anything but the collision itself, hadn’t taken in anything but the shock of the crash. She didn’t mention that she hadn’t been paying closer attention because she’d been busy imprinting the interior of the bank onto her brain.

  “Do you need someone to identify the body?” Dana asked. She surprised herself with the question.

  “You knew her?” The office frowned. He pulled in his chin and a little roll of fat appeared.

  He had mentioned the girl was a college student. Dana muttered something about being classmates and seeing her around campus. She didn’t know what had come over her. She had never seen a dead body before and up until then, that was A-okay. But she had been gripped by an urge she could not recognize or understand, only follow.

  “Her parents are coming in from Chicago,” the officer said. “We could save them the grief.”

  Dana sighed. Didn’t he know there was no saving anyone any grief?

  They took an elevator down to the morgue and passed through a cool, shadowed hallway. They stopped in front of a dark window. Dana could hear music coming through the glass. It was faint. A Michael Jackson song. For a moment, she imagined the medical examiner moonwalking around the autopsy room. The officer asked if she was ready. She nodded. A light came on.

  The girl w
as lying on a coroner’s table. She was naked, which alarmed Dana. It didn’t seem right for her to be uncovered; someone had been careless. Her breasts were small and her knees seemed too big for her body. Her eyes were closed. Her hair looked wet and sleek. The blood had been cleaned away. Dana wondered where her bicycle helmet was. She couldn’t believe this was the same girl she’d seen sprawled out on the street. It looked like her body had been replaced by a fake. How could these parents from Chicago identify their daughter with any kind of certainty? Maybe that was what happened when you died, Dana thought. Your real body went one place and a replica was provided for the rituals. And if that were true, where did the real bodies go? Someplace nice? Probably not.

  “So is it her?” the officer said.

  “What?” Dana turned from the window.

  “Is she your classmate? Do you know her name?”

  “It’s not her,” Dana said.

  “What do you mean it’s not her?” The officer frowned again. He was getting less attractive by the minute.

  “I made a mistake,” she said.

  “Who makes that kind of mistake?” For the first time she noticed the gun holstered to his hip.

  Dana wasn’t afraid to just tell the officer the truth. After all, she hadn’t broken any laws, that he knew of.

  “Look, I wanted to see a body. I wanted to know what it would be like.” She thought of that turkey in Elijah strolling through the woods one minute and still the next.