The House of the Scorpion

by Nancy Farmer

  Jorge’s story was called “Why Minds Gather Dust Like Old Rooms.” “If we work all day in the hot sun,” said Jorge, “what happens to our bodies?” He waited expectantly, just like Raúl had.

  “We get dirty,” a boy said.

  “That’s right!” the Keeper said, beaming. “Our faces get dirty, our hands get dirty, our whole bodies get dirty. Then what do we do?”

  “Take a bath,” the boy said. He seemed used to the drill.

  “Yes! We clean off that old muck, and then we feel good again. It’s good to be clean.”

  “It’s good to be clean,” said all the boys except for Matt, Chacho, and Fidelito. They’d been taken by surprise.

  “Let’s back up so our new brothers can learn with the rest of us,” said Jorge. “It’s good to be clean.”

  “It’s good to be clean,” said everyone, including Matt, Chacho, and Fidelito.

  “Our minds and our work may also collect dust and need washing,” the Keeper went on. “For example, a door that’s always being opened and closed doesn’t stick because the hinges never get rusty. Work is the same way. If you don’t loaf”—and Jorge looked straight at Matt, Chacho, and Fidelito—“you form good habits. Your work never gets rusty.”

  Wait a minute, thought Matt. Celia’s kitchen door was in constant use, but it swelled up on damp days and then you had to force it open with your shoulder. Tam Lin got so irritated by it, he put his fist right through the wood. Then it had to be replaced, and the door worked a lot better afterward. Matt thought these things, but he didn’t say them. He didn’t want to miss another meal.

  “So if we work steadily and don’t loaf,” said Jorge, “our work doesn’t have time to get dirty. But our minds can fill up with dust and germs too. Can anyone tell me how to keep our minds clean?”

  Chacho snickered, and Matt poked him with his elbow. The last thing they needed now was a wisecrack.

  Several boys raised their hands, but the Keeper ignored them. “I think one of our new brothers can answer that question. What about you, Matt?”

  Instantly, everyone’s eyes turned to Matt. He felt like he’d been caught in the cross beams of El Patrón’s security lights. “M-Me?” he stammered. “I just got here.”

  “But you have so many ideas,” Jorge purred. “Surely you wouldn’t mind sharing them with us.”

  Matt’s thoughts raced through the arguments the Keeper had already presented. “Isn’t keeping your mind . . . clean . . . like keeping the rust off door hinges? If you use your brain all the time, it won’t have time to collect germs.” Matt thought it was a brilliant answer, considering the question had been thrown at him out of the blue.

  But it was the wrong answer. He saw the other boys tense and Jorge’s mouth quiver on the edge of a smile. He’d been set up.

  “Diseased opinions not suited to the good of the people have to be cleaned out with self-criticism,” Jorge said triumphantly. “Would anyone like to show Matt how this is done?”

  “Me! Me!” shouted several boys, waving their arms in the air. The Keeper picked one with really spectacular acne covering his neck and ears. All of the boys had bad skin, but this one took the prize. He even had zits nestling in his hair.

  “Okay, Ton-Ton. You go first,” said Jorge.

  Ton-Ton had a face that looked like it had been slammed into a wall. You could see right up his nostrils and maybe, Matt thought, get a peek at his brain.

  “I, uh, I thought about stealing food this morning,” said Ton-Ton eagerly. “The cook left it unguarded for a minute, and I—I, uh, wanted to take a pancake, but I, uh, didn’t.”

  “So you harbored thoughts contradictory to the general good of the people?” said Jorge.

  “I, uh, yes.”

  “What punishment should a person have who harbors contradictory thoughts?”

  What language were they talking? wondered Matt. Each word seemed clear enough, but the meaning of the whole slipped away.

  “I—I ought to, uh, have to recite the Five Principles of Good Citizenship and the Four Attitudes Leading to Right-Mindfulness twice before, uh, getting food next time,” said Ton-Ton.

  “Very good!” cried Jorge. The Keeper selected several more hands after that, and each boy confessed to weird things, like not folding his blanket correctly or using too much soap. The punishments all had to do with chanting the Five Principles of Good Citizenship and the Four Attitudes Leading to Right-Mindfulness, except for the case of one boy who admitted to taking a three-hour siesta.

  Jorge frowned. “That’s serious. No breakfast for you,” he said. The boy looked crestfallen.

  No more hands shot up. The Keeper turned to Matt. “Now that our new brother has been educated as to the meaning of self-criticism, perhaps he’d like to share his personal shortcomings.” He waited. Ton-Ton and the other boys leaned forward. “Well?” said Jorge after a moment.

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” said Matt. A gasp of horror went around the room.

  “Nothing wrong?” said the Keeper, his voice rising. “Nothing wrong? What about wanting to put computer chips into the heads of innocent horses? What about fouling the bag of plastic strips used for making sandals? What about inciting your brothers to loaf when you were supposed to be cleaning the shrimp tanks?”

  “I fouled the plastic strips,” squeaked Fidelito.

  He looked scared out of his wits, and Matt quickly said, “It’s not his fault. I gave him the bag.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Jorge said.

  “But I puked!” insisted the little boy.

  “It’s not your fault, brother,” the Keeper said. “You were led astray by this aristocrat. Be quiet!” he said with a hint of anger when Fidelito looked ready to take the blame again. “The rest of you must help this aristocrat see the error of his ways. We do this because we love him and want to welcome him into the hive.”

  Then they all attacked him. Every single boy in the room—except Chacho and Fidelito—hurled an accusation at Matt. He talked like an aristocrat. He folded his blanket in a swanky way. He cleaned under his fingernails. He used words people couldn’t understand. Everything Chacho had mentioned—and more—was thrown at Matt like balls of sticky mud. It wasn’t the unfairness of the accusations that so hurt him as much as the venom that lay behind them. Matt thought he’d been accepted. He thought he’d at last come to an oasis—ugly and uncomfortable, but still an oasis—where he could feel welcome.

  But it was all a sham. They knew what he was. They might not understand how appallingly different he was, but they knew he didn’t belong. They would keep hurling mud at him until he suffocated under its weight.

  He heard the boys go away. He heard Chacho swear as he was forced to climb into a bunk bed. Matt was left alone, curled up in the middle of the floor, like the unnatural creature he was. And yet—

  Inside, from a place Matt didn’t know existed, a host of voices rose:

  Here’s the dirty little secret, Tam Lin whispered in his ear. No one can tell the difference between a clone and a human. That’s because there isn’t any difference. The idea of clones being inferior is a filthy lie.

  Then Celia’s arms were around him, and Matt could smell the cilantro leaves she chopped up when she was cooking. I love you, mi hijo, she said, hugging him. Never forget that.

  Next El Patrón put his gnarled old hand on Matt’s head and said, How I scrambled for the coins the mayor threw me! How I rolled in the dirt like a pig! But I needed the money. I was so poor, I didn’t have two pesos to rub together. You’re just like I was at that age.

  Matt shivered. El Patrón hadn’t loved him, but the emotion the old man had given him was just as strong: the will to live, to put out branches until he overshadowed the whole forest. Matt turned away from El Patrón and saw—in his mind—María.

  Gosh, I’ve missed you! said María, giving him a kiss.

  I love you, Matt said.

  I love you, too, María replied. I know that’s a sin, an
d I’ll probably go to hell for it.

  If I have a soul, I’ll go with you, promised Matt.

  Matt rose from the floor and saw that the room had been darkened. Chacho and Fidelito were watching him from the top bunks near the ceiling. Someone was going to be sincerely sorry he put Fidelito on a top bunk. Chacho pointed at the door and made an extremely rude hand gesture. Fidelito lifted his nightshirt and mooned the missing Jorge.

  Matt had to swallow hard to keep the tears from rolling down his face. He wasn’t alone after all. With friends like these, he would triumph, as El Patrón had triumphed over poverty and death so long ago.

  30

  WHEN THE WHALES LOST THEIR LEGS

  One thing was certainly true: Something did paralyze your sense of smell in this place, because Matt no longer noticed the foul air. The food tasted better, too. Not good, but not totally disgusting, either. Day after day he, Chacho, and Fidelito walked the long row of shrimp tanks and cleaned out bugs. Every evening they trudged back to a meal of plankton burgers or plankton pasta or plankton burritos. Carlos never seemed to run out of ideas for things to do with plankton.

  When the growing cycle was over, Ton-Ton came out with a huge, slow-moving harvester. It groaned along like an arthritic dinosaur and dumped the contents of the tanks into its cavernous belly. Matt filled them again from a pipe running out of the Gulf of California.

  At the far western end of the shrimp farm, the boys could look through the fence at the channel that had once been as wide as the sea. It was a deep blue, with hordes of seagulls. Chacho balanced on the rim of a tank to get a better view.

  The lower part of the fence was safe to touch, although the top wire buzzed and popped with electricity. Fidelito stretched his arms through the mesh, as though he could touch the enticing blue if only he tried a little harder. Matt searched for weak places in the mesh. Escape was never far from his mind.

  “What’s that?” asked Chacho, pointing north.

  Matt shaded his eyes. He saw something white peeping over a fold in the ground.

  “Doesn’t look like trees,” said Chacho. “Want to take a look?” The sun was beginning to lower in the west, but the lure of something new was too great to resist.

  “This is going to take a while. You wait here,” Matt told Fidelito. He knew the little boy didn’t have the strength for an extra walk.

  “You can’t leave me. We’re compadres,” said Fidelito.

  “We need you to guard our stuff,” said Chacho. “If anyone tries to steal it, kick them where I showed you.”

  Fidelito grinned and saluted like a midget commando.

  Matt and Chacho walked over a landscape even more desolate than the area near the saltworks. There, if it rained, a few stunted weeds struggled to the surface. Here there was nothing except white patches of salt. Seashells dotted the surface, evidence of the living sea that had once stretched from horizon to horizon.

  “Maybe it’s only a salt bed,” said Chacho.

  As they got closer, Matt saw odd shapes thrusting up. Some were paddlelike, others were thin and curved. It was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. They came up a slight rise and looked out over a deep chasm. It was filled from side to side with bones.

  For a few moments Chacho and Matt stood on the edge of the chasm and said nothing. Finally, Chacho murmured, “Somebody lost a heck of a lot of cattle down there.”

  “Those aren’t cattle,” Matt said. The skulls were huge, the jaws shaped like monster bird beaks. One rib alone was longer than a cow. Mixed in with them were the paddlelike bones, massive enough to make tables or even beds. So many skeletons were jumbled together, Matt couldn’t begin to count them. He guessed there were hundreds. Thousands.

  “Isn’t that a human skull?” said Chacho.

  Matt squinted at the shadows partway down and saw what Chacho was pointing at.

  “Think about it,” the big boy said. “If someone fell in there, he’d never get out.”

  Matt thought about it. He’d been about to explore the pit, stepping from bone to bone like climbing down a large tree. Now he saw that the whole pit was delicately balanced. Put one foot in the wrong place, and the whole structure would collapse. He clenched his teeth, sickened by what he’d almost done.

  “We’d better go back,” said Chacho. “We don’t want Fidelito poking around here.”

  Fidelito had been entertaining himself by splashing his feet in a shrimp tank. He’d draped a net over his head for a sunshade. “What was it?” he called to Matt and Chacho.

  Matt described the bones, and to his surprise, the little boy recognized them. “They’re whales,” said Fidelito. “Eight of them beached themselves where I lived in Yucatán. They swam right up on shore and then couldn’t get back. Mi abuelita said that was because they used to walk on land and had forgotten they didn’t have legs anymore. ¡Fuchi! Yuck! They smelled like Jorge’s sneakers! The villagers had to bury them in sand.”

  Fidelito chirped and warbled about rotting whales all the way back to the factory. Anything to do with his grandmother got him going.

  What could have lured all those whales to their death? thought Matt as they trudged along the line of shrimp tanks. Maybe the chasm was still full of water when the Gulf of California dried up. Maybe the whales decided to wait there until the rains came and the gulf filled up again. Only it didn’t fill up and the whales had lost their legs, so they couldn’t walk home anymore.

  • • •

  Every night Jorge told a bedtime story and afterward invited the boys to confess sins. And every night the boys, led by Ton-Ton, hurled accusations at Matt. It was meant to humiliate him, but the odd thing was that the attacks hurt less the longer they went on. Matt thought it was like listening to a barnyard full of turkeys. El Patrón sometimes ordered dozens of the ridiculous birds when he was planning a party, and Matt liked to lean over the fence to watch them. Tam Lin said turkeys were the stupidest birds in the world. If they were looking up when it was raining, they’d drown.

  At any rate, turkeys went into a wild-eyed, head-banging panic when a red-tailed hawk went over. Gobble-obble-obble-obble, they shrieked, even though they weighed five times as much as a hawk and could have stomped it into the ground. That was what Matt heard when the boys trotted out his crimes: Gobble-obble-obble-obble.

  Jorge’s eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened into a thin line when Matt refused to confess, but he said nothing. Chacho and Fidelito quickly learned that the easiest way to avoid trouble was to give the Keeper what he wanted. They confessed to all sorts of creative sins, and Jorge was so pleased that he hardly ever punished them.

  Matt was especially tired this night after the walk to the whale pit. He mumbled his way through the Five Principles of Good Citizenship and the Four Attitudes Leading to Right-Mindfulness. He barely heard Jorge’s story. It was something about how you needed all ten fingers to play a piano. The fingers had to support one another and not try to show off by being individualists.

  Fidelito admitted to gagging over plankton milk shakes, and Chacho said he used bad words when the wake-up bell went off. The Keeper smiled and turned to Matt. But Matt remained silent. He knew he was being stupid. All he had to do was confess to something small, but he couldn’t force himself to grovel in front of Jorge.

  “I see our aristocrat needs further education,” said the Keeper. His gaze passed over the assembled boys, and all at once the atmosphere changed in the room. Everyone stared down at the floor, and no one put up his hand. Matt roused himself out of his stupor long enough to notice. “You!” barked Jorge so suddenly that several boys flinched. He pointed at Ton-Ton.

  “M-Me?” squeaked Ton-Ton as though he couldn’t believe it.

  “You stole a holo-game from the Keepers’ rooms! We found it under a pile of rags in the kitchen.”

  “I, uh, I, uh—”

  “Cleaning the Keepers’ rooms is a privilege!” yelled Jorge. “It is earned through obedience and good behavior, but you’ve failed in y
our duties. What should be done with a boy who sneaks around and takes things the others don’t have?”

  The Keepers have things the others don’t have, thought Matt. He didn’t say it aloud.

  “He should work extra hard,” a boy guessed.

  “No!” shouted Jorge.

  “Maybe he can—he can apologize,” someone else faltered.

  “Haven’t you learned anything?” the Keeper bellowed. “Worker bees must think of the whole hive. If they gather nectar for themselves and don’t bring anything home, the hive will starve when the cold weather comes. That’s not what workers do. It’s how drones behave. They steal from others. But when winter comes, what happens to the drones?”

  “The good bees kill them,” said a boy almost as small as Fidelito.

  Wait a minute, thought Matt.

  “That’s right! The good bees sting the evil drones to death. But we don’t want to go quite that far,” said Jorge.

  Matt let out the breath he’d been holding. In Opium murder was a casual thing. He didn’t know what the rules were here.

  By now Ton-Ton was reduced to absolute terror. Tears and snot ran down the boy’s unlovely face. Matt was surprised to feel sorry for him. Ton-Ton was a slimy suck-up who deserved whatever was coming.

  “Assume the position,” said Jorge.

  Ton-Ton stumbled to a wall. He leaned against it with his arms stretched out before him and his hands flat against the wall. He spread his legs.

  “Remember, if you move it will be worse for you.”

  Ton-Ton nodded.

  The Keeper unlocked a small storage closet and selected a cane. Matt could see they were of all sizes. Jorge took his time making the decision. Ton-Ton whimpered softly.

  Finally, the Keeper brought out a cane about the thickness of his thumb. He thwacked it against a bed to test its strength. Otherwise, the room was perfectly silent, except for Ton-Ton’s snuffles.

  Jorge paced back and forth. He seemed to be deciding what part of Ton-Ton to hit. The boy’s arms and legs were trembling so hard, it seemed likely he’d fall over before Jorge laid a hand on him. Matt could hardly believe what was happening. It was so cruel, so pointless. Ton-Ton had shown himself eager to obey. He humbled himself whenever the Keepers asked. But maybe that was the point. El Patrón said easy targets were opportunities to frighten enemies you weren’t ready to tackle just yet.