“What do you mean?” someone asked.
“It’s something tyrant governments used to do back on Earth,” said Carver, “before the comet. So people used to switch houses. They’d send their children to the neighbors or to less-immediate relatives. That way, if the soldiers came and made them do things, at least they didn’t have to cut their own child or whip their own mother.”
Milo’s eyes stung.
We could run, he wanted to say. We could hide. But he knew what Jale would say.
They’d make it worse.
What do you do, he wondered, when you scratch around for courage and it won’t come?
You fake it, said the voices in his head.
So he said, “All right.”
And Suzie said, “All right.”
The whole Family Stone said, “All right,” and the line melted back into the village.
“Suzie,” said Jale, “you’re going to come with me. Chili is going to Rose’s hut. My father is going with Milo.”
She ticked off other arrangements, but Milo barely heard.
The twins. Dammit, how come they were always out of sight when things got crazy? Then he remembered what Carver had said. They were smart. They’d figure it out. And there was nothing he could do for them, anyway. But—dammit! His mind went in circles this way.
He and Suzie kissed. Around them, other families kissed and parted.
He walked to the hut where Jale’s dad, Old Deuteronomy, was already waiting.
The sun passed behind Jupiter, and the stars came out, and some of the stars moved and circled, and came in low, and landed on the beach.
—
In the dark, Old Deuteronomy groped for Milo’s arm and gave it a squeeze.
They heard voices among the huts closer to the beach.
There was the sound of the sea on the shore and insects in the jungle.
Waiting. Maybe they had gone?
Voices exploded, shouting. One brief scream, followed by the unmistakable smack of fists on human flesh.
Milo and Old Deuteronomy both leaned forward, almost rising, almost yelling out.
Be wise, said Milo’s head. He subsided. So did the older man.
Through the door, Milo watched a tableau of shadows and silhouettes. Mostly still…the shapes of the village huts, the trees near the beach, with stars beyond and Jupiter’s ghostly crescent. But other shadows, too. A helmet, the blunt shape of a burp gun.
Another hut—closer this time—erupted in curses and something shattering.
And another hut, farther down the beach. And another.
Sometimes it sounded as if every single one of the islanders had been pounced on at once, as if the night itself had gone bloodthirsty. Other times there might be just one or two huts getting attention, and you could hear every thump of a club, every scream or whimper. Some of the soldiers must have brought whips or belts.
Now and then, gunfire.
Once—for ten minutes straight, it seemed—a small child screamed a singular high-pitched wail of agony, and Milo heard muttering then, all around.
That’s how they’ll get us, he thought, despairing. Someone will resist, and others will join, and they’ll shoot us all.
After that, there was a long silence. Milo began listening for the sled engines, hoping, and he was still listening when three shadows crowded the door.
“Stand up!” roared the soldiers. Before Milo could move, a rifle butt cracked the side of his head.
They jabbed a rifle up under his jaw and forced him to his feet and pressed something into his hand. A whip of some kind, like a squid, with a hook at the end of each tentacle. A gun muzzle dug into his neck.
Fully amplified, the Monitors screeched, “Up! Get up! Get up, you fucker! You wanna die? You wanna die? Is that what you want, you piece of shit? Get up do it do it do it! Hit him! Hit that old moon nigger! Hit him—” And Milo saw Old Deuteronomy looking up at him with hard eyes, shouting, “Do what they tell you!”
Discipline.
Incredibly, Milo raised his arm and brought the whip down across the old man’s shoulder. Felt it catch. Felt the hooks dig in and the whip jerk to a stop and his arm jerk to a stop. Old Deuteronomy shrieked.
Milo gave the whip a flick, freeing the hooks. Blood spattered. Bits of skin stuck all over the hut.
“Do it again do it again do it again!”
Something hot stabbed him in the leg. One of the soldiers laughed.
Up and down went Milo’s arm—slash—jerk—(flick)—spatter.
They made him do it nine times.
Milo listened to Old Deuteronomy’s breathing, which was weak. The flare had begun to die, and in the fading light he watched the old man rock back and forth, just slightly.
He would hit the old man, Milo knew, as many times as he had to. He would, if necessary, kill him.
The soldiers took the whip from him and left.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Milo.
“Yes,” said the old man. “Quiet.”
—
Milo didn’t know when the cartel ships lifted off. When the sun slipped out from behind Jupiter, they were gone, and the Family Stone went through a blank, staring time.
About half of them had scars now, on top of their tumor welts and bent limbs.
He looked for Suzie.
Here she was! Looking dazed and blood-caked, part of her left ear sawed off.
“It’s okay,” she kept saying. She let Milo steady her.
Milo felt his undamaged body like a new kind of nakedness.
“They made Carver shoot Chili,” Suzie whispered. “Wrapped his hand around the gun and squeezed his hand with their hands.”
Chili, thought Milo. But it was an empty thought just yet. Just a name. Some kind of feeling would come and fill it in later. Wouldn’t it?
He walked off alone, looking for the twins.
—
He found Serene in minutes. The sea had dropped away to low tide, and she sat near the precipice with Cracklin’ Rosie, who wore a poultice over one eye.
“Hey!” Milo yelled, rushing forward.
Serene glanced his way, then went back to staring at the horizon.
Where was Carlo? Milo realized he had never seen one twin without the other.
When he drew closer, Milo realized Serene was shaking so hard, so fast, that it looked like stillness.
“Did they…?”
“They didn’t touch her,” whispered Cracklin’ Rosie, stroking the girl’s hair.
Relief.
“I don’t know how they knew,” said Rose. “We put them in two separate huts, but they went and found Carlo and brought him and made them…”
Her voice trailed off.
“Made them beat each other?” asked Milo.
Rose put a hand to her mouth and closed her eyes.
“No,” she said, so quietly that Milo had to read her lips.
Minutes later, Carlo came down from the village with Number One, Rose’s brother. Slowly, self-consciously, the boys sat in the sand next to Serene.
None of them spoke. There was a terrible awkwardness between them now.
Milo sprang up and walked away before they could see him cry.
—
In the days that followed, the Family Stone was quiet and hollow-eyed. They did their work without speaking.
Milo took tsunami watch for a month. Suzie left the village with paper and charcoal, saying she was going to map the island.
Some people walked into the sea.
The cartel dumped off newcomers, who walked into the sea or stayed and became islanders and took new names. Christopher Noonguesser. Rome. Posh. Sir St. John Fotheringay. There was a whole family of crawler saboteurs: Mr. Jones, Mrs. Jones, Yoko, and Fyodor, all of whom became pump engineers.
Milo watched the water and tended the drum. He let the stone and the sand and the wind have him.
—
“Gotta show you something,” said Suzie, hiking up to the tsunami dr
um one morning. “It might be important.”
She kissed him on top of the head. He turned and gave her a squeeze.
Suzie had brought Christopher Noonguesser to mind the drum, and she led Milo to a distant cliff.
Pointing straight down, she said, “There.”
An iridescent patch on the water, right where the surf broke.
That’s how they found the missing cartel ship.
They climbed down and dove to the wreck. The pilot still sat in his chair, strapped in tight, bones stripped by fishes. His passengers drifted behind him, bones in party clothes, swaying in the current.
Later, back ashore, Suzie said, “We won’t tell the cartel.”
Milo nodded. He acknowledged her with burning eyes.
They told no one.
—
Ten more people walked into the sea.
They had a big, fat funeral.
Jale said the names this time.
“Hobbit,” she said, followed by, “Doris, LoJack, Gavin McLeod, Peter McPeter, and Orm. Jilly, Nathanial the Digger, Mustang Sally, Nellie and Nellie’s Husband and Nellie’s Other Husband. Michael Ben-Jonah, and Carter, and Shane.”
Instead of a bonfire, everyone made a little wooden boat and set it on fire and sent it burning out to sea. Milo thought the surf would eat the boats, but the night was eerily calm, and they burned for some time and spread out and out, like stars.
—
Milo resumed his vigil at the tsunami drum, but he didn’t sit there draining away, like before. He meditated about things he remembered. It was like watching his mind play movies.
Movies of his dad. Movies of playing with Bubbles and Frog and favorite times with Suzie. Things he was proud of, like when he dove down deep that first time, without training, and the time he had saved the Buddha from drowning.
His inner voices were much clearer suddenly. He remembered being in Vienna and having a fiftieth anniversary party and falling to his death and surfing and being a father and living in Ohio and almost being murdered in Florence, Italy.
He sat there for five weeks, remembering, and talking with his voices.
He remembered quite a bit about Suzie. She came up to bring him some redfish and hikipikiiaki berries, and he made love to her on the spot.
“You remembered,” she said afterward. “Just a guess.”
“Yeah. I remembered.”
“Took you long enough.”
And eventually the idea came. It wasn’t brilliant or complicated or new. It was just perfect for that particular place and time.
It was an idea that began with a story.
After a while, High Voltage came up to ask if he wanted a break, and Milo said, “Hell yes,” and took his story down to the village.
—
They were having another funeral. Kind of a mix this time—some were suicides; some were not. It had been a bad cancer week.
Milo stood quietly, a safe distance from the fire. The story would wait.
They watched the fire afterward, and when a little time had passed, Milo cleared his throat and said: “Listen.”
The Family Stone turned and looked at him, and eyebrows were raised. Milo had smeared some kind of black shit all over his body. On top of that, he had smeared some kind of white shit, in the shape of bones. He looked like a child’s drawing of a skeleton. They gave him their complete attention.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he announced. “Afterward I’ll tell you why I think the story is important, but for now just listen. Okay?”
Silence.
“A long time ago,” he began, “on an island somewhat like this one, there lived a man named Jonathan Yah Yah. And Jonathan Yah Yah was one of those people who are afraid of everything. When a bully beat him up in school, he was afraid to fight back, for fear of making things worse. All his life he was in love with Marie Toussaint but never once brought her flowers, because what if she didn’t like him? As long as he kept his love secret, it was possible that she might love him back. If he brought her flowers and she laughed at him, then this illusion would slip away and things would be worse. Later, when he was poor and had a dull job at a toilet junkyard, he was afraid to look for a better job. What if he didn’t find a better job, and his boss found out and fired him? Things would be worse than before. Things could always be worse.
“And then he died.
“They carried him up to the boneyard and buried him. And Jonathan Yah Yah lay there in his coffin, feeling all sad because of the crappy life he had settled for. Because of all the things he hadn’t done, because he was afraid. How silly it was, being afraid like that. Either way he’d be in his grave now. The only difference was, he might have had a fine life to look back on and be proud of. As it was, here he lay with his memories of the toilet junkyard.
“As it happened, Baron Samedi, a powerful voodoo loa, was sitting atop a nearby crypt at that moment, having a cigarette, and he called out, ‘Jonathan Yah Yah! Come up here and talk to me!’
“And Jonathan Yah Yah climbed out of his grave and dusted himself off and waited to hear what the loa had to say.
“Baron Samedi said, ‘Jonathan, you have my sympathy, because you have missed your chance for a happy life. But you also have my contempt,’ and he crushed out his cigarette on Jonathan’s forehead, ‘because you have let fear make your decisions for you. So I am going to do you a favor. And I am also going to do something cruel.’
“Jonathan Yah Yah asked, ‘What is the favor?’
“And Baron Samedi answered, ‘I will allow you one day more to walk on the Earth with the living, to do whatever you wish.’
“Jonathan Yah Yah bowed and was grateful.
“ ‘And what,’ he asked, ‘is the something cruel?’
“And Baron Samedi answered, ‘I will allow you one day more to walk on the Earth with the living, to do whatever you wish.’
“And the loa vanished in a great cloud of ash.
“In the morning, the sun came up, and Jonathan Yah Yah walked out through the cemetery gates. He meant to make the most of the day, more than any day before.
“The first thing he did was find the man who had bullied him as a child. He was going to punch the man in the face, but then fear spoke up.
“What if you are jailed? said the fear.
“But Jonathan thought about this and said, ‘Let them jail me. At the end of the day, I will be in my grave!’
“And he punched the man and broke his nose. This felt good, and the man looked afraid to hit Jonathan back and afraid to call for the police.
“ ‘I should have done that years ago,’ said Jonathan to himself.
“Next, Jonathan went to the house where Marie Toussaint lived with her husband, and he brought her flowers and gave her a lingering kiss on the lips. He saw a light in Marie Toussaint’s eyes that he liked very much, and he thought, I really should have done that long ago! Then her husband punched Jonathan in the face, but Jonathan didn’t care. ‘I am for the grave, anyhow!’ he said, and bowed his way out.
“Last, Jonathan Yah Yah went to see a cattleman he knew and said, ‘If you would hire me to tend your cattle, I would be attentive and thorough and take pride in doing good work.’
“And the cattleman said, ‘Very well. Come back tomorrow, and I will give you a horse and a rope, and you can work six days a week.’
“On his way back to the boneyard, Jonathan politely quit his job at the toilet junkyard, something he had wanted to do for years.
“As he climbed the hill to the boneyard, Jonathan began to feel a terrible sadness. Why, he thought to himself, there was so little to be afraid of! Pain? Sadness? Death? All these things came to me, anyway, and I have nothing to show for them. How easily I might have had dignity. A family. I might even have been a cowboy.
“It was much harder now, lying in his grave, knowing that he might have lived happily with far less grief than it took to live afraid. That was the cruel thing Baron Samedi had meant for him. And he pa
ssed into death that way, full of regret.”
Milo paused.
No one said anything for a bit.
“So,” said Sir St. John Fotheringay, “the thing with the black paint all over you, and the skeleton, that’s meant to illustrate, basically, death, right?”
Milo nodded.
“You’re saying you’re dead,” said Yoko Jones, “and so are we. All of us.”
Milo nodded and smiled.
“It’s about the cartel,” said Jale, speaking from beyond the firelight.
Milo nodded and held up a skeletal hand.
“We are living as slaves,” he said, “and pretending that it’s okay because there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“There’s not,” muttered Fotheringay and a lot of other people.
“We have absolutely no power—” said Old Deuteronomy.
“We have all the power!” interrupted Milo, with unusual force. “Because the cartels and their goons depend completely on us for work. The cartels could not exist if people didn’t choose to work for them.”
“We don’t choose,” said Fotheringay. “They force us!”
“Force?” said Milo. “That’s not possible. What are they going to do, come down here and move our arms and legs for us? They need us to do it ourselves, and we only do it because we are afraid. That’s not force. That’s fear, and it’s a choice.”
The Family Stone chewed on that awhile.
“If we stop working,” said Fotheringay, “they’ll kill us.”
“They can’t kill us all,” answered Milo. “Like I said: They need us.”
“They only have to kill a few of us, is the idea,” said Yoko Jones, “and then the rest of us will chicken out and go back to work. Right?”
“Wrong,” said Milo. “Because we won’t be afraid.”
“The thing is,” said Fotheringay, “I rather think we will be afraid.”
Milo pointed at the fire with one hand and at the sea with the other.
“We take our own lives by the score!” he shouted. “We’re already poisoned, already sick, already half dead! How many of you are thinking about walking into the ocean right now? Raise your hands.”
No one.
Then one hand.
Reincarnation Blues Page 32