Woke Up Lonely

by Fiona Maazel

  The man told him to hop in. “You’re in luck. I’m pointed exactly that way.”

  His voice was phlegmy, as if the walls of his nose and throat were slopped in roux. He was missing fingers that mattered for making a good impression.

  “The name’s Jerry. You?”

  “Jonathan.” Olgo said it deliberately, testing the consonants for what pleasure they gave his tongue in bringing them to life.

  “Well then. Hope you don’t mind the dogs. The bald one, you can put one of them pups on your arthritis and the skin is so hot it cures you. Folklore, but I done it. And I got arthritis in places no one but a pup’s gonna go without complaint.”

  Olgo looked away. If he had wanted to talk, he also had standards. He thought about retreating to the backseat, claiming fatigue, only between it and the tailgate was a trellis for keeping the dogs put that did not seem so reliable. The bald one already had his snout wedged through.

  Olgo said, “Is that okay? Your dog like that? I think he’s stuck.”

  “Not really. But just see what happens you go find out.” Jerry laughed, like whatever mauling had befallen him in the past was good times. Olgo thought he even flourished his knuckle stumps, though maybe he was just swatting the air.

  “I’m going to see my wife,” Olgo said. “She doesn’t know I’m coming, though.”

  “Yeah? I had a wife once. But we don’t talk. When I came back from the services broke, she didn’t like it. Now my son and his family live near, but it still feels like I got nothing.”

  “What do you do these days?”

  “This and that.” He rolled up his sleeve and began to savage his bicep. When he was done, the patch of skin was candent and striking against the livid ink sealed into his arm.

  “Oh Christ,” Olgo said, and he reached for the door handle.

  Jerry grinned. “At eighty miles an hour, I’d say you’re not gonna make it.”

  The tattoo was bigger than any Olgo had seen on file. It stretched from elbow to shoulder, and the rungs of the double helix were pearled—this version more science, less metaphor.

  “Are you taking me back to them?” Olgo said. “How did you even know where I was?”

  Jerry pointed at a CB radio bolted to the underside of the steering column. The radio was waterproofed in plastic. “Looks like it’d be in the way, but it doesn’t bother me none.”

  Olgo said, “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s like this. There’s an APB out for that car you were driving, for one. Ugly business with that car. Someone spotted your plates, said there was some jackass cursing all up and down the highway. Also, the feds put out the word. Found out maybe you wasn’t there when they came a-knockin’.”

  “So everyone knows I’m out?”

  “Everyone with a CB. Whole world is listening. All that fancy equipment, and some idiot is still using the CB.”

  “Are you taking me to the Helix people or not? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not me they want, just anyone. To make a point. I do this for a living, conflict resolution, so, ah, talk to me. There’s no need to be confused about what we each stand to gain.”

  “Sure there is. We’re all confused. Let’s call it the human experience.”

  Olgo frowned. A preacher man.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Jerry said. “I’m seventy-nine next week. God willing.”

  Olgo pressed his head to the glass—how was he even having this conversation?—and began to regret in earnest having left the Helix House. Why couldn’t he have waited for Hostage Rescue? Wherever Jerry was taking him, security would be tighter and the turncoats fewer.

  “So let me get this right: You’re a bounty hunter for the Helix? At age seventy-nine?” Sixty might well be the new forty, but seventy-nine was eighty and eighty was nine hundred.

  “Seventy-eight, thanks.”

  “I have money. I could get money.”

  “Oh, don’t talk stupit. I don’t like that kind of talk. I’m principled.”

  “You’re above money?” Olgo cowered with the thought. In all his years negotiating, it was always the principled who stood their ground with the least remorse.

  Jerry shook his head, said, “I’ll tell you all about it later,” and pushed Play on a cassette deck sized like a hardback novel.

  And so it went: Show tunes. Oklahoma! and Cats and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Jerry singing in tandem but not in key. He had several five-gallon jugs of gas in the back, which meant they could go for hours without having to see anyone, which they did. Olgo was so clammy by the time they rolled into Blackstone, his skin was made of eel.

  He did not know the area well, but he gathered they were close to Richmond, having drifted into Virginia a while ago and been headed east the whole time. Eventually, they pulled off the highway, and when they saw signs for Fort Pickett, Jerry said, “USS Pueblo, I was on that ship, you know.”

  Olgo said nothing. So Jerry was a Helix-touting ex–navy man. Bad news. Also, the Pueblo? God knows what the North Koreans had done to the sailors off that boat; Manchurian candidate might be a step up. How’d Jerry lose his fingers, anyway?

  “That should mean something to you,” Jerry said. “You’re almost my age, I bet. You lived through the war.”

  Olgo’s mouth blew open. He flipped down the visor and evaluated what he could in the mirror. The skin about his lips was pinched. The whites of his eyes were not so white. He seemed to have grown lappets overnight. In general, the impression was of a man who’d lived in the sun and slept on sandpaper.

  Jerry went on. “You and me have something in common now. Both kidnapped. I didn’t have to pick you up, you know.”

  Olgo gathered his wits. Another way to hatch accord between parties was to get on record their differences and then to look for shared ground. He said, “Okay, I see you think you’re doing me a favor, whereas I think the opposite. Maybe we can come to terms. Because, frankly, taking me prisoner is not going to avenge whatever it is you want avenging. The Helix is finished. The place was surrounded when I left. The government is probably arresting Thurlow Dan as we speak”—though here he paused and smiled bitterly. Thurlow Dan, that wife-stealing shitfuck.

  “Prisoner!” Jerry laughed. “I’m not taking you prisoner. You already been through that, and besides, it’s unAmerican.”

  “What?”

  “Un-American,” Jerry said. And then, looking at Olgo with an appraiser’s eye, “Or aren’t you one of us? Whole country’s full of people who don’t look the part, so I never know who’s who anymore.”

  “What?”

  They pulled into a gravel driveway that ramped up to a single-car garage addition on a converted trailer home. Prongs of ice hung low from the gutters, and from sky to foot was a gray so ambient, it could blanch your heart in minutes. Olgo winced and waited and summoned the courage to run.

  Jerry let the dogs out. He was gripping a carnation of fabric so that his sweatpants wouldn’t fall and wrestling with the rear door, which would not close. Hard to say which problem had him worse.

  “Shit car,” Jerry said.

  Olgo’s breath purled from his lips. A man across the street was shoveling snow, wearing orange camouflage gloves and a trapper hat. There was music in the air, guitar licks, and Olgo thought he saw a woman fat as a yak vacuuming inside. He surveilled their lawn and wished he hadn’t: hanging from a tree turned gibbet was a deer carcass with skin rolled down from the neck, over a brick that gave purchase to a rope, and at the end of this rope, two boys, seven or eight, heave-hoeing amid the steam still lifting from the animal’s flesh.

  The man waved. “Eight o’clock,” he yelled, and Jerry nodded before plunging a key into the front door of his house.

  Run, Olgo thought, and walked inside. The man was a twig. Did not seem to carry a firearm or have an incarcerating posse in the living room. Run, Olgo thought, and undid his scarf, noting that Jerry’s furniture was sealed in plastic. The place was overrun with cats and, in the bathroom, a
litter of kittens not one week old.

  “I rescue ’em,” Jerry said. “Else they just howl all winter long, and the sound is like people bawling for everything that’s unfixed.”

  There were fifteen bags of cat food pushed up against the wall. Jerry toed a rubber ball that skidded across the floor. Four cats tore after it; the others couldn’t be bothered. Jerry said he’d be right back, and when he returned, he wore a terry-cloth bathrobe that exposed his skinny legs and gym socks tubed loosely around each calf. He popped a cube of gum in his mouth. “Hubba Bubba. Want one? I’m ’bout to shower.”

  Olgo shook his head. He’d heard of abducted children who could escape at any time but never did. Whose minds had exiled the very idea of escape, so that when asked about it later, they regarded the concept the way a toddler might consider a new word—with wary enthusiasm because haven’t I heard this someplace before? Olgo had been here only five minutes and already he was stuck.

  Jerry settled into an armchair. Olgo said, “So, do you want to tell me what’s going to happen to me now? That family across the street, are they Helix, too?”

  “They was,” he said. “That’s how they met. My son never went to a dance in all his life, what’s it called, a RYLS, and next thing he’s married this woman—there wasn’t so much of her back then—and joined up.” He blew a bubble and went cross-eyed to watch it grow.

  “That’s your son?” Olgo cursed under his breath. So Jerry did have people. Backup.

  “And his wife. And them kids. I left the Helix easy enough, but for Buzzy, I got one of them exit counselors. Took us a year of planning. All nicey-nice, and for what? He’s all spaced out. Dissociation, they call it, from all them hours just telling on himself in a room.”

  Olgo thought of Kay, her beautiful mind seized and plundered by these nuts. Why hadn’t he noticed the crossroads-of-life events that prep a person for cult induction? Had she been depressed? Menopausal?

  Restless? Bored?

  “You’re ex-Helix?” he said.

  “Yep. An’ I still can barely make a decision on my own. We have this joke now: only thing scarier than Loch Ness is Together Ness, though maybe it’s not so funny.”

  “Are we far from Richmond?” Olgo said. Though, really, what was he going to do? Pluck Kay from their midst? He couldn’t know how lost to them she was, but he’d heard stories. The power of group doctrine and how the person deputized to speak for the group was more worried about winning its approval than dealing with the enemy. Assuming he was the enemy—though how was this possible? His wife of thirty-five years would choose a cult over him, thanks to the five minutes she’d been among them?

  Jerry produced a knife from his bathrobe pocket. He examined his hand and began to scrape at the dirt plastered to the underside of the thumbnail he had left. Kittens mewling. A car engine that would not catch.

  “’Bout an hour,” he said. “Give or take. But not to worry. I know all the back roads.”

  Olgo was about to ask what this meant when there was a knock at the door, then a pounding, and the sound of many people barreling into Jerry’s place.

  Buzz had dundrearies like it was 1975. He was dragging a grill on wheels into the kitchen, except the wheels were missing and the legs grated the floor.

  Olgo sat up as Sissy thrust a pail of charcoal briquettes at his chest, because him sitting around was not going to get this dinner on the table any faster. Her hair was buff, feathered to the chin. She was chopping sausage. Said, “You know, I was just sick at my stomach when I heard about you and the others. But when Dad said he was gonna help, well, we all gladdened up a little. He’s been on the road two days. Wouldn’t take a cooler, neither. You like a little blood in your meat? Barbecue’s almost heated up.”

  Buzz had cracked the transom above the back door in the kitchen, but this did little to exhaust the room of smoke. Sissy said, “You know, my family was raised similar to the type of Amish with no electricity. But all of us girls has turned out to be terrific girls. We are six, except until the Helix caught hold, and now we’re two dead. So you see—” But then her boys tornadoed through the room and Sissy was up after them with a dishrag. The effort took her breath away, and she was back on the couch before long. “Buzz don’t know apples about rearing kids,” she said. “He ever had a thought in his head about them, it a-died of loneliness.” She peeled a potato. “He left me once. Right after we got out of the Helix. Then thought better of it.”

  Olgo blinked at her slowly. He’d been confused and afraid and then confused all over again, but now he was something different. Bigger. His heart grew ten feet. He did not think it was an accident, him being shepherded from the Helix House and into the arms of—well, he didn’t know what these people were except that maybe they were God-gifted to tell him something.

  “Anyway,” Sissy said, “my sisters took up with Thurlow, and one suicided for him not liking her enough, and the other got an abortion, which was afoul of God, so she died. We had such ideas, too. Just yearning to be a part of something. Stupid in backsight. But the thing is, you never knowed what you was signing up for. It all happened so subtle-like. Me, I’m not fancy-educated, okay, but half the people who talked me in were Harvard.”

  “Amen to that,” Jerry said. He was sitting on the couch with two kittens in each hand. “So little,” he said. “Helpless.”

  “Yep,” Sissy said, and she looked on her boys. They were slamming each other against the wall to see who could do it harder and to more lasting effect. George had a cut down the side of his neck but would not cede the game.

  “They was born Helix,” she said. “We been out a year, but I still give ’em lots of rope. They’s still learning how to be just boys. Most horrible mistake of my life. They daddy could be anyone, though probably it’s Buzzy.”

  Olgo sat forward. His voice came out low. Reverent. He was stuck eight thoughts back. “Thought better of it?” he said. “Left you and came back?”

  “Yessiree. Wasn’t gone too long, neither. Sometimes, though, you can’t wait. So don’t you worry none.”

  Olgo leaned way over the table like he might clutch the billows of skin come down her shoulders and said, “When he left, did you feel like he’d taken all the colors of your life with him? All the water, the light, the air? Like he’d left you for dead except being dead would have been better? Did that happen to you?”

  She laughed. “That’s hokey talk. I grew up on a farm. I know how to fend for myself. Plus the Helix made me confused about Buzzy, like I weren’t married to him but just to the group.” And when Olgo did not return to the couch but just hung there as though waiting to be slapped, she said, “You oughtta see your face. You look like you left yer guts in the john.”

  “Oh, leave him be,” Jerry said. “I’ve seen that face. I’ve worn that face. All hopeless and ruined. Eleven months in a shit-hole jail in North Korea, you bet I seen that face.”

  “Umm-hmm,” Sissy said, and Olgo sat down. He got the feeling that though she’d heard this story a thousand times, today it was actually germane to something transpiring in their lives.

  “Eleven months,” Jerry said. “You know the slits wouldn’t even let you sing in your room? I was never much for singing before, but just for being denied”—and he blew out another show tune that sent the cats tumbling from his chest.

  “Terrible,” Sissy said. “Man’s just gone afoul of God.”

  “Our captain near got beat to death. Others too. And whenever there was free time, which was pretty much never, but when there was: no football, ’cause the huddle meant plotting. Like we was plotting to escape. Stupid slits. I still have nightmares.”

  “And they still got the Pueblo,” said Buzz.

  “Correct,” said Jerry. “Like some trophy. Not that we tried too hard to get it back. Day we was released, a hospital in Seoul gave us each an ashtray souvenir. You believe it? Eleven months of turnip soup—and eyeball was a treat, mind you—and they give us ashtrays. I mean, this was in ’sixty-eig
ht, so we was no one’s favorite army. But still. I hate this country, I really do.”

  Olgo could not fathom where this was going, but he was decided to go along with it. Left and came back were the only words that mattered now. He glanced up at Sissy, waiting for more.

  Jerry sank into his chair. “I know it’s an awful thing to say.”

  Sissy patted his hand. “We all of us been disappointed.”

  Jerry spat into a napkin. “Second I heard Thurlow was in with those same who took the Pueblo—man. What was I thinking? Sissy’d done lost her sisters and there I was still going to meetings and saying my heart’s broke ’cause of my wife and kin. Well, I had my eyes opened. And got my son out. But it didn’t feel like enough, so I been biding my time, jus’ hopin’ I’d get the chance to do more. And along comes you four. And along comes you.” He laughed and just as suddenly coughed up something with such force, it might have come from his colon. His face was twice its color, and his eyes were clear in tears. “It’s stupid, I know, but even at my age, I’m still looking for a hero. So maybe that hero is me.”

  Olgo heard him—a hero, yes—though he kept his eyes on Sissy.

  “Anyway,” Jerry said, recovering himself. “Here we are. You gotta figure everyone finds his own kind eventually. We’ll eat and then get a move on. We got a long night ahead of us. I best put my jeans on.”

  Sissy lifted her paring knife and said, “It’s not like I’m okay with this, Dad goin’ back in and all. But he’s strong. He knows his up from down.”

  Jerry smiled and looked at Olgo. “Plan is for you to show up like you been invited, like you’re interested. You’ll have ’em all over you, so while that’s doin’, I’ll swing round back. Best way is to isolate and ambush. Guy who used to do this in the seventies was called Black Lightning. I kinda like that. Even m’ jeans are black.”