by D. J. Molles
“Walter,” Pops scooted to the edge of his seat and pointed a bony finger at the Chinese characters on the box. “You think I can’t read that shit? I ain’t takin’ no Chicom meds. Not sure where you got ‘em, but I don’t want that shit in my veins, you hear?”
Walt had to take a breath. The anger really had been very sudden.
He clutched the sides of the box. Looked at the ground. Almost afraid to look at his father. Afraid of how angry it was going to make him. And he didn’t want this night to end in blows, or even in shouting, both of which were possible, and had happened in the past.
“Pops,” he said, choosing his words deliberately. A man walking a tightrope and on either side the open drop of a lost temper. Walt had never had a great temper. Neither had any of the other Baucom men. “This wasn’t a handout, if that’s what you’re worried about. If it makes you feel any better about it…” Walt toyed with how much to say here. “This was taken from the Chicoms. It was taken from them, and now I’m giving it to you. And you’re going to take these doses, because they are going to keep you alive, and that’s what I would really like for you to do.”
“Why?” Pops demanded.
“Why?” Walt finally looked at him. “’Cause you’re my Pops. Is that really a question you need to ask?”
Pops leaned back in his chair again and his eyes went up and down—the box, then Walt, then the box, then Walt again. He made a sound of uncertainty, like a dog who isn’t sure whether they’ve heard a suspicious sound or not so they’re just going to lie there, grumbling under their breath.
Walter stood up. He put the box of meds on the seat he’d just vacated. Then he turned to his father. “You’re going to take those meds, Pops.” It wasn’t a command. More like speaking in faith. In hope. “And they’re going to kill this thing inside of you. And you’re going to buy yourself another twenty years. And it’s going to be worth it, okay? It’ll be worth it, I promise you. But you have to trust me. Just trust me.”
“How’d you get the meds?” Pops asked, quietly.
Walt shook his head. “Don’t worry about how I got them. They’re yours now.”
Pops looked at him. Then he looked around, as though there might be someone else in the little duplex that he hadn’t realized was hiding in some dark corner, eavesdropping on their conversations. Back to Walt, with a whisper. “Are you fighting? Are you resistance?”
Walt stood there in his father’s shitty living room, looking down at the older man, but seeing a gray plastic tarp rolled up, a pair of boots sticking out.
But Walt hadn’t pulled the trigger.
Walt hadn’t snatched him.
Or any of the others that he’d helped interrogate.
He’d just…helped.
Not for idealistic reasons. Just because he needed the money.
“No,” Walt shook his head. “I’m not a part of the resistance.”
Chapter 6
Walt drove on old two-lane roads, back to his home. In the darkness of the cab of his truck, the white cardboard of the remaining case of meds seemed to glow. He looked over at it, once or twice, thinking about the astronomical number that Virgil had told him the doses were worth.
And, at the same time, knowing damn well that he wasn’t going to sell it.
He wasn’t going to see a red cent of what it was worth.
How the hell was he supposed to go to dying people and charge them money for their lives? He only knew a few people in the immediate circle of friends that he trusted not to dime him out for having stolen Chicom meds. Of those people, three of them had family members with early onset symptoms of red lung. The meds could be the difference between life and death.
And he would not be willing to charge any of those people.
He let out a frustrated sigh. Gripped the steering wheel harder.
His personal account—the one tied to his PD, tied to Carolyn—it was always hovering in the lower-income margin of $10,000-to-$0, and every once in a while, overdrafted, which was probably the source of damn-near every argument he’d had with Carolyn in the span of their five year marriage.
But Walter had a second account.
An illegal account. Tied to a fake identity. Which was pretty much the only way you could accumulate money through illegal measures—every other source of income went through the Fed. But in a small lockbox, in the glove compartment of his old pickup truck—old being important, because no one would be likely to break into it—he had a datajack. A little piece of equipment that he just plugged into his current PD, and everything he ever was or earned or did or searched simply disappeared and he became a man that never had actually existed, a man called John Tapper.
And in John Tapper’s accounts, there was $55,778.
He should’ve added several grand to that for today’s services rendered. But all that potential money had taken the form of a white cardboard box with Chinese characters that was supposed to be worth so much, but in the end would be worth nothing. Not monetarily, anyways.
Could you put a price on life?
Walt laughed, grimly.
Yes. He could. Or, at least, John Tapper could. And to John Tapper, the value of saving those lives was exactly $0.
There would be other opportunities. Other jobs.
He was so close. So close, and yet it seemed like the last twenty grand would be the hardest to get his hands on. But it would happen. It would require patience, and then, one day, that fictional account would have enough money in it, and everything would be made right.
Walt thought about how excited Carolyn would be, the day that he could finally tell her.
He would never be able to tell her how he got the money. No. Of course not. Not in a million years. But he didn’t think she’d press the issue. He didn’t think she’d demand to know where the money came from. She’d be so excited that she wouldn’t care.
He didn’t like sneaking around behind her back, but if he told her his plan, she would make him stop. She would make him promise. She would work him, just as she’d always been able to do. And he would cave. No matter how important the purpose of the money was. He would cave because she would be miserable if she ever found out.
This way, she didn’t have to worry about it.
And in the end, Walt thought that she’d forgive him his deceit.
***
He had met Carolyn the first day of his last year in high school. She’d been sitting in the back row of his classroom when he walked in. He was a sullen seventeen-year-old, depressed from a summer of living in a family torn open by its second disappearing.
First, it’d been Grandpa Clarence. And then it had been Roy.
Now their house seemed empty and quiet. Dead inside.
There was an insidiousness to the disappearings. It was not like death, where things were final—you had a funeral, you grieved, you put a body in the ground, and you celebrated a memory. There was no ceremony to mark when a loved one had been disappeared, no way to get closure.
Because there was this ridiculous, futile hope that maybe—just maybe—one day they would just…drop that person back off. And everything could be normal again.
But Walt knew he would never see his Grandpa Clarence again.
And he knew he would never see his brother again.
Because nobody that got disappeared ever came back.
Nothing was sacred. Nothing was safe. Every part of your life was disposable, according to the whim of people you did not know, and whether they deemed you to have crossed the often-shifting lines of what it was to be considered a “domestic terrorist.”
That was the mindset that Walter Lawrence Baucom III had settled into when he walked into his senior homeroom, and he saw Carolyn in the back of the class, sitting there with her head down, much in the same manner as he was holding himself.
Walter’s innate abilities had not been forcibly exercised in years. The poker games that Roy and Virgil used to drag him to so that they could be kings for a night were
a thing of the past now. But the ability remained, and whether or not Walter knew he was doing it, he could feel other people. Poignantly at times.
And when he saw Carolyn in the class that day, he felt her very clearly. And there was something in the familiarity of seeing someone suffer what you yourself are suffering. Some sense of sudden commiseration, a camaraderie that connects two people, even if they don’t know each other, because they know that they have been through the same thing.
And, of course, it hadn’t escaped his notice that she was pretty.
He was seventeen. Pretty girls never escaped his notice.
Her hair was a dark, earthy blonde. Almost brunette if the sun hadn’t brightened it. Her skin was tanned from being outdoors all summer, maybe working one of the vegetable farms where things still had to be harvested by hand. It struck him that her skin and her hair were almost the same color, and he thought that was interesting. But her eyes stood out starkly, a bright color of hazel. Delicate features. Generally, a kind of delicate manner about her.
He’d never seen her before. Which meant only one thing.
She was new to the school, and people did not just show up to a new school for senior year, and certainly not a school in an Agrarian District. Growers didn’t move around from District to District. Not unless something bad had happened.
Walt took a seat next to her in the classroom. He realized the he’d been staring at her and that he was walking unconsciously towards her. When he realized what he was doing, he was already standing next to the seat adjacent to her, and at that point it was either introduce himself or play it off and take his seat—act like he had been going there all along.
He took his seat. Tried to play it cool. Of course. When you’re seventeen, you always have to be cool.
She caught him looking one or two more times that day.
She didn’t crack a smile.
Walt figured he was irritating her.
At lunch, she sat alone. Walt couldn’t help himself. Didn’t want to be that guy who just kept silently staring at her from across the room, but then he couldn’t quite stop staring, so he decided to nut up, so to speak, and he walked over to her.
He stood there across the lunch table, holding his own brown bag, wondering what the best words to say were to break this icy silence.
And yes, it was icy. That was something Walt would always remember. But even then, even in his relative inexperience with women, he sensed that the ice was very thin, more of a skin, more of a defensive measure than anything truly significant.
Walt gave his best smile—well aware it was not the best, just his best. But he’d always been comfortable with himself, at least. He had that going for him. “Can I sit here?”
She looked up at him. Seemed to be studying him. He wasn’t quite sure what she saw, besides the obvious: another lanky-limbed grower boy, still wearing his tans for the third time since they’d been washed, the sides of them streaked with grease and stained with purple regulator cleaner. Really, pretty much a wreck. But if one took a moment to look around, one could see that he wasn’t out of place. Not around here anyways.
“Sure,” she said.
Walt was almost surprised.
He sat. Quickly, like he thought she might change her mind.
“I’m Walter,” he said, not bothering to extend his hand or anything like that. He wasn’t sure why. She seemed like such a clean, delicate thing, like she didn’t belong in an Agrarian District. And here he was, this colossal wreck, with his stained fingers and dirt under his fingernails and his dirty tans. Perhaps he felt unworthy to touch her.
“Carolyn,” she replied, still eyeing him. “Hartsell.”
If for no other reason to escape her evaluating gaze—Walter always felt awkward when someone looked at him like that, always had the sneaking suspicion that he was coming up short somehow—he opened his brown bag and began pulling out his lunch, wondering what he’d gotten himself into, and what the hell he was supposed to say next.
He was drawing a bit of a blank, and he had twenty-five minutes of lunchtime left.
“I saw you looking at me,” she stated.
Once again, he was taken by surprise.
That was…quite a bold statement.
And unexpected from her quiet voice and soft demeanor.
Walt looked up at her, his hands frozen in the unwrapping of his sandwich. She had her elbows up on the table, a fresh tomato perched between her slender fingers. Nice fingers, delicate, like the rest of her—and lo and behold, what was this under her nails but a bit of dirt?
She had one eyebrow up, awaiting his response to this charge.
Looking back on that moment, Walt was pretty sure that was the moment that he fell for Carolyn Hartsell. Because suddenly and inexplicably, he felt okay. Unlike every other interaction with girls so far—pretty much just sexually-charged verbal jousts—he felt weirdly comfortable. Relaxed. And it was nice. It was very good to feel the warm, slackening of tensions in himself.
“Yes,” he said. Then he smiled.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why were you looking at me?”
She knew the answer. She wanted him to say it.
He opened his sandwich. It was white bread with a slice of cheese product. Pretty typical lunch fare. His Mom tried to go light on lunches so that they could afford better dinners. Maybe once he started working full time they’d do both.
He looked back up at Carolyn.
“Because you’re new,” Walt said. He watched her expression, saw just a shade of disappointment, because that was not what she’d wanted to hear, but obviously, she wasn’t going to go fishing for it. And strangely, Walt felt immediately averse to being the source of her disappointment—something that would carry through to nearly every aspect of their relationship from that moment on—so he told her what he knew she wanted to hear, and it also happened to be the truth: “And because you’re pretty.”
Honestly, he was very impressed with himself. Roy had always been the bold and reckless one. Walt got into his fair share of tight situations, but it was less because of his own nature, and more because he followed Roy around. It was not his usual way to be quite so straightforward. He was more likely to sit back and allow things to take their own course.
She began to slice her tomato with a piece of plastic cutlery. She cut the tomato carefully. Then she stabbed two thin slices and held them out to Walt. “Here,” she said. “Your sandwich looked boring.”
Later, that would become a running joke. How the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, but Walt must’ve been desperate, because she won him over with two slices of tomato.
Walt accepted her offer, of course, and had the best tomato-and-cheese sandwich that he’d ever recalled having. And for twenty-some-odd minutes, he forgot about his unpromising future, and the disappearings, and the CoAx, and the Fed. He was focused on Carolyn in those minutes, and it seemed like, despite everything else, things were going to turn out okay.
***
It wasn’t for another two weeks and several more lunches of small talk that he dared to ask the more personal question that had been pestering the back of his mind since the first day he saw a new girl sitting in the back of his homeroom.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, almost with a cringe, thinking, here you go, here’s where you blow it to pieces.
Sometimes people in Carolyn’s “situation” were sensitive about their past. But Walt had met many more that actually wanted to talk about it. And what little read he could get off of Carolyn, she struck him as perhaps wanting to get it off her chest.
And in that moment, it seemed like she knew what was coming next. He watched her straighten up a bit, as though bracing herself.
“Sure,” she said, a little stiffly.
“Are you a ward of the state?” he asked, studying her face.
She looked down at her place, then nodded. “Yes. What gives it away?”
Wal
t shrugged, tried his best to communicate that it wasn’t a big deal, to make her comfortable with it, let her know that he accepted it. “The fact that you’re here,” he said, gently. “No one transfers out of their home District. Not unless the state moves them.”
“Hm,” was all she said to that.
Walt poked at his food for a bit. “I, uh…” he needed to give her something here. He’d just pulled off a scab. Exposed her. Here they were at lunch, busy forgetting about how shitty things could be, distracting each other, really, from the reality outside those school walls. And here comes Walt, making it all real, all present, all right now. “I’ve lost two,” he said with decisiveness. “My grandpa and my brother. They were both disappeared.”
She looked up from her plate.
And just like that, they had something in common. Something besides the surface bullshit with which they’d filled their lunchtime conversations for the last weeks. Something that was not just about music and entertainment and other meaningless things that were bound to change. This was something that went hard, like a vein of some unwanted, poisonous ore, down through the crust of them and into the core of who they were.
A shared pain. The fellowship of misery. Of sleeping at night, wondering when the boogeyman might throw a diversionary grenade through your door, leave that crescent-shaped scorch mark on your floor, just like it had with your brother, with your grandfather, and maybe this time they were there for you. Or even worse, for the precious few family members that you had left.
But…if Carolyn was a ward of the state, then she had no family left.
“Both my parents,” she said. “Taken on the same night.”
Damn. Walt kept the word from exiting his mouth.
Her whole life. Destroyed in one swipe. One minute a happy family, and less than sixty seconds later, she was an orphan, a ward of the state, and everything she thought she knew about her future was gone, changed. She was suddenly someone else, living someone else’s life.
They didn’t say anything else about disappearings that lunchtime. They just stayed quiet for a bit, then finished up with more insignificant small talk about what they had planned for the weekend. She had to work, and so did Walt. If they weren’t studying, they were doing their paid internships, because every household needed the extra income, and even if you were just a ward of the state, it was always best to show SoDro Growers Group that you were serious about your work and secure yourself a full-time position when you graduated high school.