Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

  I bought a North Carolina fishing license with one of the Federal bills, then headed for Little River, planned to poach a sleep off the road.

  Little River was a small seaport for game fishing. I scavenged some guts out of a garbage barrel and caught crabs, no South Carolina fishing license, but then I was so close to North Carolina I could claim I’d not noticed I’d crossed a state line.

  “What you doing?” a teenaged boy asked as I brought the crabs back to my bicycle.

  “Fishing.”

  “You camping out?”

  “No, I’m not. I plan to check in a motel.”

  He smiled. I got back on the bike and rode for ten miles before I trusted that he hadn’t followed me.

  I should have asked if he wanted to buy a fuck or watch me with a vibrator. Diseases? None of the veneral diseases now was 100 percent lethal. The Feds would cure me when they caught me.

  Or not. Commercial sex was still a gambler’s way.

  I pulled way off the road and cooked my crabs, wishing I’d stolen a handgun, even one that shot red paint.

  The dark threatened some thinking out: the Feds couldn’t catch Miriam and Joe. Or had Miriam and Joe been informants? Why hadn’t the Feds emptied Jergen’s head as they had mine? Why did they let him keep me secret? I knew I wasn’t an informer, but if the Feds were hunting Miriam and Joe, but not me, then I sure looked like an informant. I hoped the Feds thought I was too insignificant—minor player, a name in other people’s files. Jergen disappears. His girlfriend isn’t being chased. If I’d known Jergen had turned himself in, I would have wished he’d tipped me off somehow so I could have just disappeared, not gone back to Miriam and Joe.

  The next day, I was in Myrtle Beach, looking through the fringe community for the right bulletin board to advertise my ticket. I found one in a New Age restaurant. Before I wrote the card, I pulled out the ticket and noticed that it was round-trip, like I was going to fly of my own accord back to North Carolina.

  All the easier to sell, though. I wrote on the card that I’d be back for lunch on the 30th, but before I’d got to the door, I heard a voice, “Hey, you with the ticket to Frisco.”

  I turned around. Everyone in the restaurant was looking at me. The guy who yelled came up. He wore black clothes, a turtleneck sweater and cords, but he looked military, too exercised and held together to be a real New Ager. I almost ran, but decided his money would be real enough. “Yes, and you can change the days for another twenty-five dollars coming or going.”

  He looked at the tickets, pulled out his billfold, paid me. I doubted, somehow, that he was planning to desert.

  With the money I got I went out and bought travelers checks with most of it, a motel room at winter rates for the week with the rest. The motel parking lot was full of incongruous cars, either wrecks about to be abandoned in ditches or stretch limos with matt black fenders. As I figured, the clerk checking me in didn’t question my story about my ID being in the mail.

  For two days, I rode the bicycle around, fully loaded, as though I’d be headed away at any second, but went back to my motel room at night, behind a lock.

  The second night a motel clerk, a tense boy, came by. “We’d like to see your identification card. You said friends were mailing it to you.”

  “Where I’m ending up, not here. I was afraid I’d lose it on the road.”

  “I don’t believe you,” the clerk said.

  “So,” I said. “The motel would be in trouble for not insisting to see my ID the first day.”

  “I guess people can tell what kind of motel this is,” the boy said. “Well, we don’t want trouble here.”

  “What kind of motel is it?” I said. “Maybe I better leave.”

  “You looking for work?”

  “Non-sexual. Maybe sexual if the money’s right.”

  “We thought about selling you to a guy in New Orleans when you first came in, but there’s people watching you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You make us nervous. We’re refunding you. Go away.”

  “You could keep the money if I could borrow one of those delivery junkers.”

  “Could I have the bicycle?”

  “Hey, kid, you could bonk me over the head and call the Feds.”

  “Is the bicycle stolen?”

  “I suppose.”

  He wrote on a piece of the motel’s stationery, holding the paper against the mirror so it didn’t imprint on anything. If I get you a car, could you meet me down at the Pavilion in an hour and give me the hike and $150?

  I went to the mirror and wiped it, up and down, signalling thief yes. “Sorry, we couldn’t come to terms. I’ll be leaving in the morning. Thanks for not bopping me over the head.”

  “De nada,” the boy said.

  Its just a replay of the last time, I found myself thinking, a long run for nothing.

  But now I could move forward at speed. I wondered what would have happened if I’d been kidnapped and shipped to a brothel.

  I made the trade down at the Pavilion, let the boy ride my bags down to the car, then strolled around by the screaming machines for a while before heading for the car, if he really had given me real keys to an active car.

  Life’s dangerous for unconnected women. Except for the year after Jergen disappeared, I’d never been alone. Even then, I had ecology contacts, sympathizers who let me sleep in the backs of bookstores, sweep, cook in their restaurants, babysit.

  Fuck. Yeah, that, too.

  I thought about all the people I’d suspected of not quite being committed, the people who like to talk firemouth, but who’d never do an action themselves. All in favor of them, you know, but the job or family didn’t leave them enough time to participate.

  Those people. I remembered a couple in Berkeley. Yes. If they weren’t around, then Berkeley was full of eco-warrior would-be’s. I turned the key in the ignition. Yes, bring those suckers a nice visit from Mr. Kearney and Lt. Mike. Radicalize them, or scare them away from even expressing a rad sentiment. Either way, they’d be improved.

  The key worked. So, I drove and didn’t try to lose the helicopters, the grey cars studded with microwave antennas, the truck that didn’t pass me for fifty miles. But somewhere around Kansas, the sky was empty and no grey cars were around. I ate the greasy bean burgers of trucker’s stops, played the machines in Elko under the nose of handgunning pit bosses and people who were probably disguised as handgunning pit bosses.

  Found a mirrored whorehouse in a legal county, and discussed working with the manager. “Not madam,” she said. “That’s for really tacky operations. We consider what we do a service.”

  “I don’t have a legal ID,” I said.

  “We can’t use you,” she said.

  “Is there anyone who could?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t know of anyone who hires outlaw girls,” she said. “If you don’t leave now, I’m calling the cops.”

  I left. Outlaw girl, I could always go back to exhibitions and stealing. The sex shops had different brands of synthetic jissom than they’d had when I was a teen ganger—oh, fake prostate juice with all the right chemicals, amazing what’s in semen besides the little sperms. I bought some for nostalgia’s sake, plus a tube of hand job lotion for guys, all the high tech chemicals that make masturbation fully satisfactory. After Jergen, I never cared about making masturbation my central sex act.

  Refrigerate after opening, the synthetic jissom bottle said.

  When I found a refrigerator, I supposed I would. I felt older than forty-four, aware of the younger civilians, the people not in on the game, watching me, smiling.

  I thought about calling the local FBI office and arranging for a flight back to my apartment jail. The car waited in the desert night, gambling lights reflected off its windows.

  I got in and drove to a rest stop where I slept for a few hours, then drove up the Sierras the next day. Good car for a junker, I thought. People filled the Sierras, even in dead winter, the snow pushed back f
rom the road, the skiers coming in with their bright industrial product skis and parkas—various hardened oils, fibers in resin, spun carbon, laying smears across virgin snow.

  I left my own mess—the fake jissom bottle stuck in the refrigerating snow.

  Then down to the foothills, at three acres per house where the government didn’t own the land. I stopped at Jackson and wondered if I knew anyone here, if anyone had a trap-door to a mine hole I could disappear down, become the hermit sage of Amador County.

  But these weren’t the people I wanted to get in trouble.

  I did eat lunch in a crafter s restaurant, though, watching the people I could have become. They talked about their gardens, their clients, the levels of giardia and E. coli in the water they tapped from the irrigation canals. Lake Tahoe skiers shat in their water.

  Down from there, I drove across the agricultural valley, the Delta like the other Delta. Fear hit me. I pulled off the road at a rest stop and waited to be busted. The truck that had been following me since Jackson went flying on down the Interstate.

  I slumped down in the seat and slept again. Where was my Federal tail? If I’d thought I could really get away, I’d have gone to Cincinnati or Louisville. Please, where are you, Mike? I was too tired to drive that far back east.

  I left the car with the keys in it at the BART station at Orinda and bought a ticket, a new-style plastic one, laser-coded for station of purchase, amount of purchase, and date of purchase. The ticket went void in five days, but any remaining amount could be applied to a new ticket.

  Meaning, someone was hacking BART tickets big time. I smiled to see evidence of other outlaws in the system, then took the BART toward Berkeley and got off at Rockridge when I spotted its funky-looking neighborhood.

  I found a public-access computer and scrolled through the messages. A Dr. Karen, whose offices were on Shattuck Avenue, was looking for drode heads to do a sociological study, would pay five dollars an interview.

  Yeah, in Berkeley, even the drode heads were on the net. Probably paid for by the city. And wasn’t I a drode head? I wrote the number down and scrolled on further. Stopped again when I saw an ad for a woman looking for a live-in baby sitter.

  Some people don’t want daycare with multiple children, all possibly infectious. Other people don’t want to be drode heads. So they meet each other. One has her job. The other’s job is the first woman’s children.

  I called the woman, Mrs. George Reese, looking for a live-in sitter. She gave me directions to her house up in the hills, but then said, “I could meet you downtown.”

  “I can get up there,” I said. “I’ll take a bus as far as it goes, then walk.”

  “No, I’d better come pick you up.”

  “Lady, I’ve already got directions to your house.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  I went up to Mrs. Reese’s house, a large sprawling glass and chrome gizmo stuck up on pilings like it really wanted to move to Los Angeles. She came out with a two-year-old girl child on her hip and said, “I work at home, but Lucinda really wants my attention, all the time.” The woman wore a long silk dress covered to the knees by a sleeveless peasant coat in hand-spun wool. She was shod in buffalo-hide sandals with wool socks knitted out of the same wool as her coat.

  I said, “I don’t have any references. I don’t have any ID. I used to be in the ecology movement. If any of that’s a problem, then I’ll be on my way.”

  “Have you ever taken care of children before?”

  “No.”

  “Could you learn?”

  The kid obviously bit. “What are you offering me?”

  “You’ll live in, get our meals, take care of Lucy during the day while I’m working. We’ll feed you, shelter you. My husband’s a lawyer. You can be his client.”

  “No cash?”

  “How can we pay you if you don’t have an ID? You’d never be able to get a bank account in the Bay Area without ID. The banks are very strict.”

  “They’re still making the folding stuff, aren’t they?”

  “I appreciate your honesty. Lucinda needs someone tough and honest. We’ve been giving to the Sierra Club for years, so I understand about ecology.”

  Probably not with a house like that, I thought. What she really needs is someone too desperate to complain to the state employment office about sub-minimal pay and poor working conditions. “Lady, I need fifteen dollars a week over and above room and board.” That would be less than what she’d pay on the open market.

  “But if you rented a room in this neighborhood, it would cost three times minimum wage.”

  “Maybe twice minimum wage, but I wouldn’t be subject to midnight calls. I could have my own friends over.”

  “Well, you could have your own friends over, as long as you weren’t noisy and didn’t bring in undesirables.”

  “I hope you find someone.”

  She said, “You won’t find many people willing to take in an undocumented stranger. Are you sure you were an ecology person? I know some of the people around here.”

  “Fifteen dollars a week. I’m going to get busted eventually. So the Feds will know you weren’t willing to pay me the minimum.” I lifted my eyebrows at her, bounced them, and smiled.

  “If you agree to fifteen dollars a week, then you’d have to sign a waiver of minimum wage.”

  “If the kid bites, I’m not staying.”

  Mrs. Ethyl Reese wasn’t really working at home. I’d call what she did a rich girl’s hobby. She wove peasant coats and place mats and all sorts of things like that. Little Lucinda loved to crawl under the loom and stand up suddenly, breaking warp threads. She did it again when Ethyl showed me her looms and spinning wheels. “Momma,” she said, throwing her hands out.

  I said, “Lucinda, your momma hired me to beat you up if you do that again.”

  “You can’t hit her,” Ethyl said.

  “But I can pick her up and hold her in the air,” I said.

  “No,” Lucinda said, not quite so pre-verbal that she didn’t understand hit, hold.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Just as long as you don’t hit her,” Ethyl said. I wondered how many sitters had quit already. “I suppose you need to get your things.”

  Lucinda ran to her mother, waved her little arms. Ethyl picked her up, and Lucinda turned around to glare at me.

  I said, “I just have the clothes I’m standing in. I don’t suppose you know of a free clothes closet.”

  “The safest one you could go to would be the one run by the Episcopal Church,” Ethyl said.

  If the momma knew that much but still couldn’t keep help, then the child was a true monster. “I guess you couldn’t drive me.”

  “I’d be happy to drive you.”

  So the monster’s momma had a nice captive wanted person to work for her. If Mrs. Reese decided she needed to find a new hire, she’d simply call the police and say she found her diamond broach hidden in my clothes. But I knew I could prove my side of the story. Brain records don’t lie.

  I couldn’t have found a better person to get into trouble. I said, “I’ve got to have some time off.”

  “It’s not like taking care of Lucy is a strenuous job.” Little Lucy crawled over me heading toward the backseat where she began jumping up and down on the cushions.

  “I think after I cook your dinner, I’ll be going out. I’ll come back at ten. That should be all right. Then you can take care of your daughter on the weekends. I’ll make some microwave casseroles.”

  “George and I plan to go away weekends. We’ve got a good house security program, but it can’t keep Lucinda out of trouble.”

  No wonder she wasn’t too scruplous about hiring an outlaw.

  “Can I take little Lucy downtown with me then?”

  “Why do you need to go downtown?”

  “Because I’ll go stir-crazy if I sit all the time around your house.”

  “You’ve already got the evening off. You could even
come in as late as midnight. The house has a good screening program. I’ll introduce you to it.”

  Ethyl watched me as I foraged through the abandoned clothes bin, looking for pants and blouses that would fit but weren’t too worn. I looked at her and figured we were about the same size, so why couldn’t she lend me some of her clothes? But no, I had to look like the help. After I picked out a couple pairs of pants and various tops, Ethyl made a contribution to the church fund.

  “I don’t think you have to do that,” I said.

  “It’s a good gesture,” Ethyl said.

  “If it doesn’t come out of my weekly stipend.”

  For a minute, I thought she was going to pull the money back out of the box, but she merely looked miffed. Little Lucy began to run and shriek. Momma looked at me. I grabbed Lucy and carried her and the new clothes in a wadded mess to the car.

  Lucy managed to tear up one of the bras before we got home. I didn’t hit her.

  Retina, handprint, blood sample. The house hesitated as though suspicious, then logged me as an inhabitant.

  Please, oh, please, Kearney and Mike, pick me up now. I wondered if the person looking for drode heads could do evening interviews.

  After being shown the place, I fixed a meal of sorts. “Don’t you know how to cook?” Ethyl asked.

  “Vegetarian,” I said.

  “You’ve never cooked steaks before?”

  “I didn’t believe in steaks.”

  Lucy took this moment to smear peas through her hair. “We could send you for cooking lessons,” Ethyl said, “but you’ll have to pass a probationary period first.”

  Her husband, a man who looked like he ate fatty meats regularly, came in about eight. Lucy seemed thrilled to see him and obeyed when he took her to her room to put her to sleep for the night. About nine, he came out. Ethyl said, “The new sitter. She cooks vegetarian.”

  “Does she have references?”

  “No.”

  “Undocumented?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You might have not told me that,” George said. “But I prefer honest help. And I like my steaks rare, warm inside but still bloody.”