Everything is Broken

by John Shirley

  Dickie was looking right at him. He had a rifle in his hands and he had a look on his face that made Russ think:

  He’d like to tell me he shot my dad.

  Russ stared at him—letting the accusation show in his face.

  Dickie grinned and slapped his rifle.

  He did it.

  And Dickie kept looking at him . . .

  Russ tried to glare right back . . . but finally, he dropped his gaze. Looked away. Couldn’t even stare back at the guy. It was like looking into a harsh light.

  He felt the shame again. He felt like he was sinking down into his own shoes.

  Something Ferrara said made him look up again. “I’m not going to say who fired what shot. Maybe you shot him yourself accidentally, I don’t know. But I know you people fired first.”

  “That is a flat-out lie!” Dale shouted. His rifle, angling at the sky, trembled from the shaking of his hands. Russ had never seen him this angry before.

  Brand said, “We never fired at you people till you fired at us.”

  “I’m not saying I was there—” Ferrara said. “I’m just saying that the way I heard it—”

  “Well, shit, I’ll say I was there,” Dickie said.

  “Who fired first?” Dale demanded.

  “Who’s on first?” Sten said.

  “What’s on second!” Dickie said.

  Ferrara threw them a glare. Then he looked back at Brand. “Look—you speaking for those people down at the high school?”

  “I’m getting information for them. Not speaking for them.”

  “What about . . . ” Who had spoken? Then Russ realized it was him; he had said it himself. The others looked at him. Waiting. “What about my father’s body?”

  Ferrara looked him over. “So that was your father. Well. We got a flatbed truck out there and we moved the body. I got it covered with a tarp. It’s not just sitting out there.”

  “In case you need to get rid of the evidence?” Brand asked, his voice taut with emotion.

  “Like I said—you people fired first.”

  “You know that’s a lie. Where’s Drew’s body?”

  “It’s in an empty house, up across from my brother’s place, it’s wrapped up and— It doesn’t matter, we’ll turn it over to the Deer Creek authorities when we’ve got this all worked out. Between now and then, we’re the authorities, we’re the militia, and you can tell those people in that high school gym and wherever, you tell them the time has come. I’ve got a ream of announcements here about the incorporation of the town and the agreements we’re going to sign. We’re going to inspect all property to see what’s there—”

  “So you can rob us?” Dale spat. “You can kiss my black ass! That man you shot—I got to know him real good this week. That was one hell of a good man. You are not a tenth of what that man was! You can keep your fucking announcements! Someone else wants to sign it that’s their business. But keep it the fuck away from me!”

  He backed away from them, his rifle still pointed at the air but now held so he could drop it down and fire easily.

  “Yeah. That about sums it up for me,” Brand said, backing up a few steps. “Black ass aside. Come on, Russ. Pendra.”

  “You got till tomorrow morning!” Ferrara shouted as, heart thumping, Russ took Pendra’s arm, drew her back down the hill to join Dale—who was waiting for them, a little farther down, rifle now tilted so that it aimed over Ferrara’s head. Ferrara yelling after them, “Till tomorrow! Then . . . then we’re going to go down there and start searching for looted goods! And nobody better try to get through those hills! This is not going to be a goddamn ghost town! We’re sticking together to build this place back up! I’m gonna have people posted, watching! The hills and the cliffs!”

  Brand stopped long enough to shout back, “You lost your mind, some time back, and you don’t know it, Lon! But those men with you—they know it! They know damn well you’re out of your gourd and they like it. Means they can mash your buttons.”

  Ferrara looked startled at that.

  “Hey, Pendra,” Dickie called suddenly, looking all boyish and wide-eyed at her. “What’s up? You picked a side for sure?”

  Pendra said nothing. She turned on her heel and hurried down the road. Russ quickened his pace, catching up with her. Wondering if Ferrara’s men were going to simply shoot them in the back as they walked away.

  At least he’d asked about his father’s body. But that wasn’t enough. Someone needed to be arrested. There needed to be justice.

  They’d picked his dad off, just shot his father like shooting a bird off a fence.

  “How old are you, girl?” Dickie called after Pendra. “You old enough? You going to be safe down there? That kid going to protect you? I don’t think so!”

  The men with Dickie laughed at that.

  Russ felt like a compass in a roomful of magnets. Where was north?

  Nella was walking beside Mario Ferrara, wishing Dickie hadn’t asked her to do this.

  She was cold and feeling feverish and unreal. And she didn’t want to be out in the woods this clammy afternoon. Especially not with a man who was mostly a stranger to her. Nella knowing, too, what else was out here.

  The pine woods was shady and smelled of sap and the brown needles that crunched underfoot. The wind from the ocean made the trees creak and bend, just a little. Waist-high ferns were cut by trails, marked by bicycle treads. Mist drifted through, trailed from clouds.

  Mario was carrying a rifle of some kind. She didn’t know one from another. He was walking ahead of her, looking through the ferns. They’d nod their ferny tops in the breeze, as if to acknowledge him, and then he’d move on. A red squirrel rattled around in the branches overhead. A pine cone fell down, thumped in the ground, making Mario spin and stare. She saw from that how nervous he was.

  He stared at the rolling pinecone—and then he looked at her. Shook his head. “No reason for you to be here.”

  “I know,” Nella said. “I was just . . . ” What was she supposed to say? Dickie had said, If he starts to go out in those woods, you distract him, talk to him, show your titties, suck his dick. I don’t care what the fuck you do, but you do it. Keep him from going out there. I’d just shoot him but we’re not through with his brother yet. So keep an eye on him.

  She didn’t feel like kneeling on the damp ground to give this old guy a blow job. But what difference did it make? Nothing mattered anyway. Long as he didn’t want to fuck. With her infection, that’d hurt too much. It hurt just to walk. She was used to that, though. It was part of the punishment. If that’s what it was. Sometimes she thought she was in Hell, and sometimes she thought it just felt that way. She changed her mind about it two or three times an hour.

  Lately she’d been thinking that it was both. They were mortal. They could die. And they were in Hell. They’d die and then come back and die and then come back . . .

  Or it was all real, like a bee sting and sand in your eyes and loneliness. As real as that. And this was her reality. She was sure of one thing, though: nothing mattered anymore.

  She started unbuttoning her blouse.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, snorting.

  “I’m . . . we were alone and . . . Dickie wanted to make sure I was useful to you guys, he said . . . he said I should be useful and I’m not good for much else . . . ”

  “Button up your fucking blouse, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Okay.” She rebuttoned it, relieved. She’d tried. “What you looking for out here?”

  She knew, though.

  “I’m looking for . . . I’m not sure. I just kept getting this feeling.” More talking to himself now, as he looked around. “Like, Look out there, look out there. And this is the place near that house . . . I mean, if somebody wanted to hide a body . . . two bodies . . . ”

  “But . . . if they wanted to hide a body they’d just dump it in one of the busted up houses down below.”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling
.”

  But she knew why they’d ended up in the woods. Because Sten didn’t want to carry them down in broad daylight into one of those wrecked houses down there. Didn’t want the exposure and didn’t want the work. She’d heard him and Dickie talking about it.

  “You should just go back, girl—” Mario broke off, and his mouth went slack.

  Then he turned and stalked into the wet underbrush to one side of the trail. He was up to his waist in dewy fiddleheads, hurrying over to a spot where the carpet of ferns seemed abruptly interrupted. As if something had made a gap in them.

  Nella walked slowly up behind him, the feeling of dread growing in her, strong enough to compete with the burning pain between her legs.

  She came close and looked over his shoulder. Saw that he was staring down at a piece of black plastic trash bag sticking out from the turf. You could see the ground had been all dug up, here. Someone had buried something. Not very deep.

  He took a long, ragged breath, then tossed his rifle aside, and squatted down, took hold of the plastic bag’s edge, and pulled, hard. Grunting. Nothing happened for a moment—then he almost fell over backwards, as the sack came loose, tearing in places but staying together enough to pull something heavy partway out. A lot of turf came with it, pine needles and crushed ferns and dirt, and then a head lolled into view, a sunken blue face.

  “Antony!” Mario sobbed. “Antony . . . ”

  She tried to pat him on the shoulder—he twitched her hand away. She wanted to tell him about Ronnie. Say she knew about finding the body of someone loved; say she was sorry this happened to him. But she kept her mouth shut. She looked over his shoulder at the torn up sod, and she could see that there was another black plastic trash bag. You could see a corner of it, sticking up, beyond the one with Mario’s son in it. That’d be the other dead boy, Roger, who’d come to visit Freedom with Antony.

  Finally Mario got up, and she heard his every breath, wet and rough, sounding like he was having an asthma attack the way her cousin used to have. He bent over, picked up the rifle. Turned toward Antony.

  “I’ll be back, son.” He paused for a long wracking sob. “I’ll get you buried right.” Face mottled, cheeks wet, he turned away from the body and pushed past Nella, making her stagger with the force of it, and hurried back to the trail. He was starting toward the house . . .

  A thought came to her. She shouldn’t have been trying to discourage him from finding this body. This was good. Because he was going to kill Dickie. Maybe Dickie would stay dead and maybe not. But she could see him get killed. That’d be good. She could get some respite, couldn’t she? That’d be even better.

  She hurried to catch up with Mario, hardly feeling the pain in her crotch anymore.

  He walked ahead in long swift strides, cocking the gun as he went, and pretty soon they were at the backyard lawn of Mario’s house, walking through the bark dust strip between the low juniper bushes.

  Mario stopped about forty feet from the glass sliding doors to the kitchen where Sten and Lon Ferrara and Dickie were sitting at the wooden kitchen table, with Cholo and Steve standing behind them, the bunch of them smoking pot and drinking, and arguing as usual.

  “Lon!” Mario shouted hoarsely. “Lon, get out of there! Run out the front!”

  Then he popped the rifle to his shoulder and fired, without really taking time to aim closely but shooting through the glass door toward Dickie. It was loud, that shot, louder than when they’d shot Buff—

  I know, she thought, I know I helped kill Buff, I know I did, Jesus Lord, I know it.

  Glass in the sliding doors webbed and crashed apart, tinkling down onto the concrete of the patio.

  She heard the men shout stuff like, What the fuck! And she realized bullets were going to fly the other way, and she thought: I ought to get out of the way.

  But she didn’t move. She realized she was hoping a bullet would hit her, when they fired back. She stood there and waited.

  It didn’t take long before Mario had another round chambered and read, Sten was firing back with a pistol, but he was unnerved by this sudden attack from Mario and was missing, the bullets kicking up green and brown shreds of lawn behind them. Another bullet—she thought Dickie had fired it—whipped so close to her right ear she heard it buzzing like a bee, and then Mario was firing again and the men on the other side of the glass were scattering, probably thinking they’d shoot at him from the windows.

  Mario sobbed, and chambered another round. Nella heard Lon shouting at him from somewhere in the house.

  “Mario, stop this bullshit!”

  “They killed my son!” Mario wailed. “I knew they killed him! I could feel it! I heard him calling out there!”

  “Mario, what the fuck are you talking about!”

  “Fuck you, man! You’re with them!”

  He fired another round toward the house and there was a flash at a window and a bullet cut the air between her and Mario.

  Sten shouting at someone in the house, “Get away from me, man!”

  “He’s not going to hit us from there, he’s just upset—” Ferrara’s voice. “He thinks someone killed his kid, just give him a chance to cool off!” So Lon Ferrara was interfering with their aim.

  Mario was struggling with the rifle—something in it seemed stuck. “Fucking jam, fucking jam, fucking jam!” He snarled, his eyes streaming, foam at the corners of his lips. He threw the rifle aside, and shouted, “I’m going to get another gun and I’m gonna kill ’em, Lon! You better get away from them!”

  He was backing toward the woods now, and his hands were clutching the air. His teeth were clenched.

  “And . . . ” A bullet splashed at his left shoulder and he grimaced as blood sprayed, but it wasn’t deep, and he went on, “I’m fucking coming back!”

  Then he turned and strode into the woods. Another bullet chased him—she felt that one go by close too—and then he was gone, hidden in the trees.

  She realized her heart was doing a drum roll, and there was a rippling mist over her eyes, She seemed to see the dead hanging out in the shadows of the trees—was that Buff, the man she’d helped kill, right before the wave? Was that him waving at her? Or was it just the fever? But wasn’t that her Ronnie, coming up beside him? And there was Songbird, with chains wound around her wrists—and Nella thought: Maybe a bullet did hit me, maybe I’m dead so I can see them now.

  But pretty soon Lon Ferrara and Dickie and the others were out here with her, looking into the woods, their guns in their hands, arguing about what to do, yet again, and she was sure that, no, she wasn’t dead, not in any way that would save her, anyhow.

  She was seeing things in a fever, in Freedom, California. She was going to be here for a while.

  SEVENTEEN

  “Boy? You going to get out of bed?”

  It was Dale. Russ knew from his voice. But he didn’t want to turn around. He tried to ignore it. He made his breathing louder, and regular, like he was sleeping.

  Dale was not fooled. “Come on, goddammit, you’re not asleep. It’s like four in the afternoon. Come on, kid. Things to do.”

  Russ wanted to lie there, fully clothed but for his shoes. Just lie there in the bedroom that was supposed to have been his, the bed that his dad had made up for him before he’d gone to pick him up and bring him to Freedom. He wanted to just lie there staring at the wall, with the blankets pulled up to his chin, and the sea moaning in the distance, and try to be blank for a while.

  Blankness worked. Blankness felt pretty good. An absence of feeling felt good. That was a strange thing to contemplate. It made no sense but it was true.

  “Come on, Russ, you’ve gotta help us make up our tiny little fucking minds.”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” Russ said.

  Dale sighed. “Your dad died last night. And you ought to have time to grieve and lay there and just feel bad. But you don’t. You got to stand up with us and help us decide . . . That’s what you need and that’s what he’d want.”<
br />
  “You don’t fucking know what my dad would want.”

  “Pendra’s going to be there. She’s got more balls than you, man. She lost her grandmother, last relative she had.”

  Russ winced. Dale had found a chink in the blank wall.

  “Fuck. Fuck! Okay. Whatever. I’m coming.” He made himself sit up. “But . . . you know what? We did a lot already. And Dad is dead for it. And no help is coming from anywhere.”

  “We did get help. The folks from Deer Creek took our injured out. And that son of a bitch stopped them from getting the word out about the rest of us. But help will be here. We just have to survive with some goddamn dignity till it does. Now come on.”

  Groaning, Russ moved to the edge of the bed, found his shoes and put them on. He sat there, brushing his hair into something like order with his fingers. Not wanting to stand up. “So—where’s Pendra?”

  “She’s with Brand, some errand for Jill. You coming?”

  He lingered on the edge of the bed. Wanting to say, Sure, the older people tell us to buck up, and get out there and face the world because it makes them feel better when we do. But they know it’s meaningless. They know it’s always going to be a defeat.

  Then—suddenly, out of nowhere, he had a moment of self-consciousness—seeming to hear his own thoughts, to see himself sitting on the edge of the bed, half-slumped. And he saw that he was ignoble, in that moment. That was the word that came to him. He had seen the word many times, in old books, but he’d never used it himself. Too old-fashioned. But that was the right word. Ignoble.

  He sat up straighter, took a deep breath, and shook himself. “Okay. We’ll go talk about it. I’m not sure what we can do, unless somebody wants to build a boat. Or unless one of us wants . . . ”

  He almost said, Wants to get shot. Then he saw his father, lying there in that crevice.

  His mind had to stop, and back up, sometimes, when he thought about that. It still hadn’t completely sunk in . . .

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s just fucking go.”

  They went outside and downstairs, and saw Jill—who was now staying with Pendra—at the door to Gram’s apartment. Jill squinting at the door lock, fumbling as she unlocked it. Having trouble seeing. They heard Brand shout at her, crossing the street, and saw Pendra hurrying to keep up with him. Brand was grinning, nudging Pendra, handing her something. Pendra took it, ran up to Jill, who was turning to squint at them.