Which was how it happened that, having finished searching the car and finding nothing of concern there, the first trooper was the one who completed the pat down and found the bulge inside Leonard’s tube sock, at the touch of which Leonard at first maybe twitched or winced. And the trooper said, sorry if he’d hit a bruise there, and rolled up the leg of the jean and tugged down the tube sock and peeled off the bandage that had been affixed to Leonard’s ankle, revealing the pale and hairy skin unmarked by any remnant of wound, and the trooper weighed the bandage in his hand, his mouth taut with misgiving, and weighed it some more while Leonard stood there stocking footed on the asphalt and then the trooper pulled apart the cotton wadding of the bandage and found a shrink-wrapped bag the size of a thumbnail containing one eighth of an ounce of brownish chalky methamphetamine, and the trooper poked it and looked embarrassed and said, “I didn’t mean this to happen to you.” And though the eighth of an ounce the trooper was poking with his thumb constituted an offense that might have been knocked down to misdemeanor possession, the forty-seven identical packages he then found in the fuse box under the driver’s-side dash were enough to establish intent to distribute.
And Louisa knew every infraction in Leonard’s old prison jacket and she knew the sentencing guidelines for habitual offenders, and the night she received the call that he had been arrested she walked amid her astonishment alone behind the house she would not be able to afford to rent on her own, through lately timbered hardwood forest, the dead misshapen trunks of junked trees, by the muddy reservoir, over cattle guards, into a residential development and onto a paved road. Walking and thinking over the choice that lay before her.
These were the things that had happened and what she had done.
Walking through other people’s yards. The whir of air conditioners. No one outside. Knowing somehow that unless she made a choice right now at this swerve in fortune, seized the unspeakable opportunity, she would die like this, exactly like this, walking alone and all the houses sealed up against the heat, outside and unknown to those within, a woman without any people. Looking for an open door anywhere.
In the gravel apron of a driveway, a girl sat revving the engine in a car and calling for somebody to come the hell out of the house, a white girl with dreads and purple braided extensions. Louisa got right inside the car like she owned it and said she needed the girl to take her to the pay phone at the gas station. And the girl gave her the fish-eye, like Bitch, I’ll take you out. But then Louisa must have looked a fright, and the girl asked suddenly what had happened. And when Louisa later asked herself why she could not have simply gone home and placed her call there, she discovered that she must have felt it would be too cruel to Leonard to make such a treasonous call from his own home, felt it even before she understood the nature of the call she intended to place.
When they got to the Phillips 66, the pay phone had long since been ripped out of its aluminum enclosure, and the yellow and red tangled wires protruded like the vessels of a shorn limb. And the girl said she had some spare minutes and lent Louisa her cell, and Louisa called first neither a lawyer for Leonard’s defense, nor his work, nor church people who had by then for years included in their prayers the hope that Brother Leonard might continue to walk the narrow path, but called instead the number of Tilly’s drilling business, memorized but not used once, not once, since the fateful call four years before when she had pleaded with Tilly to take Elroy off her hands. I never meant it forever. I meant you to get some sense of your power and your trouble from a man you trusted. The phone rang while she gamed out the words she would say which all amounted to one or another version of treasonous confession that she’d made a mistake on the desert night when he’d asked to come in. She had said no, and she should have said yes. And would he ask her again right now? Please? All while poor Leonard was at his hour of direst need.
She was not asking forgiveness. She was stating facts.
After four rings a recorded voice told her the number she had reached had been disconnected. The girl driving the car said, “Lady, you don’t think I should take you up to see your deacon?” And Louisa called information in Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Santa Fe, saying the name and spelling it in various ways, and none yielded a number for Tilly anywhere.
And Leonard was charged with possession with intent to distribute six ounces of a Schedule II substance, his third strike on a felony drug charge, and they put him away for life. For life.
And soon thereafter she divorced him, despite his tears, a grown man’s tears in prison, and she saw him at work as he went for group. She did not hide her face. And all along she had been lying in wait to do this thing to him and not knowing it, waiting for him to fail. And this was her life, did Elroy understand?
And she lived with a lady friend, then by herself in two rooms over a muffler shop, always keeping her same job at the prison where staff and inmates alike knew she had a boy locked up elsewhere. They had a modem now in the reentry coordinator’s office and Louisa had asked the admin assistant to help her do a search of the World Wide Web, and with one click they scoured newspapers across the earth in whatever the language and found Elroy incarcerated again in the state of Maine, and she wrote him there also, letters never responded to.
And Leonard died in prison of pulmonary edema in May 2004.
And sometime around there a collection agent called her at work trying to get her to divulge the address of a Corporal Elroy Heflin, U.S. Army, and she asked how could she know they were even speaking of the same individual? And the agent quoted to her the last four digits of a Social Security number. And it was as if lightning had shot through the phone into her ear. Her boy had been turned into a number which she knew unmistakably as a cow knows the scent of her calf. Then it was she trying to pry out what the agent knew, but the agent would not say any more. Then why should she say? If the agent wouldn’t, why should she? But at least she knew now Elroy was in the army, which after all included many jobs not specifically linked to being killed and killing. She had hope for him always.
What the others at work knew of Elroy they knew only by hearsay. She did not speak of him there, only at church where she spoke silently, amid the company of other people, with God, whose ongoing relationship with Elroy could safely be presumed, whether Elroy accepted it or not, and through whom she imagined she could pass notes to Elroy in the halls of a celestial high school, God palming the many-folded note as they passed and slipping it to Elroy later during math class.
While the others sang in church and gave witness, Louisa spoke inwardly with God also on a different matter. Namely that one night in her youth, in the desert during a card game, a man who had come from what amounted to another world had asked her for the very thing she claimed she was most willing to give to all people, but because he was an individual person, not all but himself alone, asking for it from her and her alone, she had said no.
She sat on the cushion she had brought to her dark pew within the whitewashed pine walls of the Victory Church in McAlester while she and God together tried to figure out what cheap spirit had possessed her, or failure of will or vision. Or possible flaw, God admitted with reluctance, in her design.
Then her mother fell getting out of the bathtub in her rented house in Texas and shattered her femur and pelvis, and Louisa forsaking her sacred vow never to go back to the town of Lufkin, took unpaid leave from the Department of Corrections and washed the demented woman who had nobody else, nobody, and stirred her Coke to get the fizz out as her mother liked and mashed up her sweet potatoes with margarine and fed them to this woman whom she no longer had the stomach to judge and kept up her mother’s thick eyeliner, which seemed less tacky now than singular, and no one came to visit, no one. And then during Jeopardy! the category had been Flags of the World, and a bright red field appeared on the screen with a yellow sun in the middle and stylized rays and two sets of three red rows banded across the sun, and the clue said the
red of this flag stood for valor and the yellow for both peace and wealth, and the bands across the orb of sun stood for the yurt or family home and also for the universe, and Louisa shouted at the screen, “What is Kyrgyzstan!” knowing as she did the flags of all the belligerent nations where Elroy might be stationed as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, and she had been right, it was Kyrgyzstan, and she slapped the back of her mother’s hand in vindication, and the bone-bag hand did not respond but lay there: her mother was dead.
I’m only telling you what I got to put down or it’ll break my back someday.
She sold her mother’s things. She paid everybody in Lufkin—the hospital and the podiatrist and the gasoline station tab and the church loans. There remained $720 of inheritance for herself. But when she got back to McAlester she discovered that notwithstanding promises of family medical leave, the work of her department had just been bid out to contractors. And after three months living in the Sunbird, and not touching the inheritance, which she kept under the passenger-side floor mat, she got a job out in Sallisaw as simulcast teller associate in the off-track betting parlor of a casino owned by a Cherokee Nation conglomerate with their fingers in health care, environmental and construction, hospitality, real estate, security, and defense.
And what would that younger Louisa—proud vagabond, who owned nothing but her looks, her love of mankind, and her certainty that the race was doomed—have said to this later woman, gray bangs held back from the face with her mother’s celluloid comb, and still thin, able, though lacking several malignant moles and lymph nodes, a portion of one breast, and living now in Sallisaw, a place named fittingly for old meat kept edible with salt, on West Houser Industrial Boulevard in a former motel complex of cable-ready, air-conditioned, attached, four-hundred-twenty square foot, single-story, single-occupancy units with ceiling fan, some paid utilities, shared laundry room, no dogs, birds, snakes allowed, thirty-day renewing lease, one crabapple tree in the courtyard?
That girl would have said, “Better here, like this, than presuming to own.”
And what would that girl say if she should learn that the older Louisa had resolved now to add to her inheritance some small sum every week—because she was going to effectuate one last betrayal of that perfect girl in the perfect body who knew almost nothing except that love was true and owning land was wicked and on whom she had not yet much improved—what would she say if she should learn that Louisa was saving up money to buy land of her own and build a house on it?
Nobody gets to run me off: that was what she wanted. If that meant owning, she’d own. If owning was wrong, she’d do wrong.
She wasn’t going to apologize. She scrimped by dropping her cell phone contract and eating brown rice from a fifty-pound bag kept in a resealable bucket. The rice and other bulk nonperishables she purchased from a survivalist supply store where the cashier knew her by name and said courtingly he was glad to see a woman keep herself strong enough to lift the bucket on her own and ready to consider some of the truly unprecedented things that had happened in this country and were happening now and were going to happen soon, government coming, radical Islam about to establish sharia, but at least one woman was to be ready, looked like.
Such talk was general also at church. Her new church, Shiloh Missionary Baptist in Sallisaw. The present they called Today’s World. The future, Harvest Time. The catalyzing event between the two world-times was called an S.H.T.F. situation for when the shit hits the fan, pronounced letter for letter to avoid profanity, or else TEOTWAWKI, a word like a Polynesian cocktail. The end of the world as we know it. We had entered a long middle period, and not one of us could know how long, and the challenges for which to prepare were not limited anymore to nuclear holocaust but, these days, extended to land invasion through the porous southern border, EMP attacks, electromagnetic pulse, which an enemy might use to fry the whole North American integrated electric grid, leaving the internet destroyed, your bank accounts a memory, the cyborg nation exposed, helpless, gasping. The sun might cause a phenomenon such as occurred in the solar superstorm of 1859 called the Carrington Event when a white light flared in the sun’s photosphere, and eighteen hours later the earth’s magnetic field convulsed, and you could read a newspaper at midnight by the lurid aurora.
In church they spoke of the inevitability of future such CMEs, coronal mass ejections. And of LTS, long-term supply. And they spoke also of old-fashioned rapture, of the four horses in Revelation, the white, the red, the black, the pale, of the winnowing of human wheat from human chaff. And when they said, “In those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them,” the words were a comfort to her, but why? Because these were the old-fashioned end-times she had expected from a little girl. Men on horseback, opening seals. And because even though she knew this wasn’t what the verse meant, she still read into it that death might flee from Tilly and Elroy both, even though they sought it. They might hide in their holes but love would dig them out.
If you were not raptured you would have to wait. Some would eat, some starve. The beepers that sounded from garbage trucks and construction vehicles when put in reverse were omens warning that to go back was perilous and probably unworkable. They’ve already taken our country away from us.
Beans. Bulk lentils. Church people had first told her about the store, and whenever she went there somebody from church was rummaging the stocks of milk- and soy-based protein powders in multiple flavors. She couldn’t bear to confess to them that she shopped here to save as much as she could in order to commit herself to the folly of owning property so she could put a home on it. This vegetable oil was specially formulated from Canadian rapeseed to be usable in a generator if the oil went rancid before the time came for its consumption.
The store stocked ammunition in large crates for every conceivable handheld weapon. The individual elements for the making of the cartridges of basic armaments, manual presses for loading bullets into spent brass casings, single- and two-cavity bullet molds for the forging of new bullets from recovered ones or from the cames of old windows or wherever else you would scavenge your lead. They had tin and zinc and antimony to mix with the lead, harden the alloy, lower its surface tension to better fit the grooves in the mold. There were Aquatabs and liquid tincture of iodine for your drinking water once the taps stopped working and solar-powered Geiger counters with snap latches so you could affix them to the collar of a dog. There was everything you might expect to need if you were determined to survive. Still there was not enough, and Louisa wanted to grab these people in the aisles and shake them and ask who were they neglecting now to save later?
I’m saying I made a mistake, Elroy.
The store had bumper stickers. They had DON’T BE JUST ANOTHER VICTIM. They had THE PRICE OF FREEDOM IS VIGILANCE. And they had GOD RECYCLES: HE MADE YOU OUT OF DUST. And they had NOT PERFECT, JUST FORGIVEN. And they had Lenin’s face, Gandhi’s face, Jesus’ face in various attitudes, loving, angry, weeping. And they had MY SON IS IN THE U.S. ARMY. And they had ARE YOU READY? And they had MY ZOMBIE ATE YOUR HONORS STUDENT. And they had WHEN TYRANNY BECOMES LAW, REBELLION BECOMES DUTY. And they had REPENT.
She bought her rice and took it to her car and drove to the casino, a windowless fortress of reckless hope insulated against manifestations of the local hour, where she dispensed wager tickets under the banks of the simulcast screens with live feed of the sprinting greyhounds and thoroughbreds across the continent at Hazel Park, Los Alamitos Race Course, Palm Beach Kennel Club, Thistledown, Vernon Downs, Assiniboia Downs, Wheeling Island Racetrack, among the solitary men in flattops, faces pitted like sandblasted brick, smoking and taking notes with pencils worn down to half the length of a finger, men who took in hope with every breath, hobbling behind a steel cane, gripping the foam sleeve about the handle, the vinyl case for the eyeglasses bulging out of the breast pocket, men in wheelchairs and scooters trailing oxygen tanks, sti
ll seeing the money ahead, still chasing it. And at the end of her shift she went home. Her headlights caught the crabapple tree in the courtyard standing shocked and solitary over the mass of shriveled blossoms it had shed, grateful to have endured where no others of its kind had even tried.
And this was her life.
The other tenants customarily backed up their trucks and hatchbacks to their doors when they parked, as though preparing for sudden escape from the law. She recognized the faces of the vehicles even if not the faces of the owners when she espied them in daylight, coming out of their houses looking down at their phones, and getting into their vehicles looking down at their phones, and speeding away glancing toward their laps and up at the road.
She had been saving for nine years and after subtracting occasional outlays—for medical insurance deductible, people from church in need, people not from church but known to people from church to be in need—she had amassed about sixty-five hundred dollars, enough for a two-acre lot, and at this rate she would have enough for the house around the year 2055 if the price had not risen. She’d be a hundred and seven years old, and the hideous logic of debt had finally begun to work on her—once you gave in to the core idea of people owning places you got embroiled in the whole garbage storm of greed and killing.
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