Black Helicopters (12 page)

I know all this. Da said it when Bo got his license. It costs money to get a good one, but a good one is worth it. It’s worth paying money for one from the DMV — looks real because it is real — but you have to have a connection inside to skip the proof of identity crap.

I asked Da if I would have one, too, some day. Da said he would teach me in a few years, but no need for a license, not for me. A person only needs a license if they are going out into the world to drive on the highways. That isn’t my part. Even if the job isn’t part of the windup, the world outside is not a place for me. I have my Mabby’s looks. I’m noticeable. The last thing a person wants is that kind of attention.

But now I’m in the outside world. I don’t go in any stores. I wear sunglasses. I keep my sweatshirt hood on my head. Even then, I feel people looking at me when we need gas or food. I don’t know how to make them stop. I never get out of the truck unless there is no choice.

I’m the navigator. We are getting close to the pick-up zone. It would be easy to take a wrong turn and miss the contact. That would not be good. Bo says he really appreciates the help.

We arrive at the place first. It makes us a little nervous, maybe we did take a wrong turn, maybe the directions were wrong, maybe the whole thing is messed up. I don’t say any of the things I’m thinking. Finally, though, we can see dust kicked up by a vehicle coming our way.

Bo’s calm. He’s done this before. Maybe not here, with these customers, but close enough.

A silver van pulls up with a young guy behind the wheel. A really old guy gets out of the passenger side. He and Bo shake. He hands Bo an envelope, then he slides open the side door of the van.

Three pale blue dresses climb out, long skirts, big sleeves, loose at the waist. There are girls inside the dresses, like mice inside cups. Their little hand paws stick out here, and their little bright eyes peek out there. The old man goes from one to the next, putting his hands on their hair.

The old guy gets into the van. The three dresses move to stand by our truck. The van pulls away.

“Valley,” says Bo. “This is Daverleen, TheoAnne, and Teal. We are taking them to Canada.” Then he walks to the back of the truck and opens the back so they can climb into the shell. That’s where we carry the shipments, and this is the shipment we are hauling.

Night comes, but we keep driving. My job is to keep Bo mostly awake. I’m supposed to do that by talking to him, but, really, I have nothing I can say. We listen to the radio. Sometimes Bo says, “You hear that what they said, Valley?”

“Yeah, I heard,” I say, but I don’t say the rest of it, which is, “Why do you care, Bo? Why do you care what Those People say?”

Hours later, Bo gives up and pulls into a rest stop. There is no one else there — no car-house mobile homes, no semis. He gets out and opens the back of the camper shell. The three girls are still sitting all in a row at the very back. They could have been stretched out all this time, rocking down the highway like babies in a cradle, but they didn’t take the opportunity.

I can tell by the way they step when they touch the ground that their feet are full of pins and needles from being cramped up so long.

The three of them trail off toward the brick bathroom building. Bo nods I should follow. It’s no hardship; I’m ready for a rest stop myself.

Inside, all three are hidden behind the stall doors. They are whispering to each other. I don’t know why they need to whisper. I don’t care what they are saying. If they are planning to run, good luck to them. We are in the middle of nowhere, and those pioneer dresses and the bellies hid under them would have to be a drag on their speed. I suppose they could try to steal the truck, but they’d have to get the keys from Bo or hotwire it.

I don’t know why I’m plotting their escape.

I sit on the cold metal seat of the toilet in my stall, and listen to them whisper, but I can’t really hear any of the words they say — until they begin to sing.

Their voices echo and wind around each other like the songs of birds before dawn. Birds singing about rain and morning and all the other secrets in their little bird hearts.

When they are finished, I watch them wash their hands in the trickle of cold water — all three of them at once, each touching the others’ hands. They never look at their reflections in the dull sheet of metal that serves as a mirror. They can look at each other, I guess, to see themselves.

When we go outside, Bo is sprawled out on a picnic table. He needs the rest.

“Do you want to walk around?” I ask the girls. “Stretch your legs?”

They don’t answer, but they pace along the sidewalk that runs beside the parking lot. I trail after them and keep my eyes open for headlights on the horizon, but the world is as empty of people as it ought to be. The last stars blink out and the sky turns the color of cement and then begins to blue. The sun is still below the edge of the world. The fringes of the clouds flash bright and light streaks up.

“Look,” says Teal, the littlest one, pointing at the clouds. “It’s the fingers of God.” Then the sun rises higher and the bands of light fade.

Bo calls out, “Time to go.” He’s still sitting on the picnic table, stretching after his sleep, if he was able to sleep.

The shipment is obedient, they walk to the back of the truck and crawl in, all the way to the back. Then they take their places, sitting there side-by-side, skirts tucked around their feet, just like they were before.

“We’ll get you some breakfast in the next town,” says Bo. Then he shuts the tailgate and locks everything up tight. I wonder about those girls sitting there. As far as I can tell, they sleep sitting up like chickens.

“Six meaty breakfast burritos, a couple of churros, three milks, and three coffees,” says Bo at the drive-through. When they hand the food over in paper bags, he turns to me and says, “Put the milk and three of the burritos in one bag. That’s for them. You can pass it through after we get out of town.”

“Are they going to share one of the coffees?”

“They can’t have coffee on account of being pregnant — or something. You can go ahead and eat now. It’s better before it gets cold.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll wait until we’re back on the freeway, but can you pass me a coffee?”

“Are we going all the way to Canada? Won’t we have some problems getting over the border?”

“We just take these to this specified location,” says Bo, and he taps the folded piece of paper on the dash. “They got it all set up on that end to pick ’em up and take them home.”

“They’re going home?”

“Yep, that’s where they came from,” says Bo.

“What they doing here?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. Not our job,” says Bo. “And you can pass that food through to them now. Keeping them fed is part of the deal.”

I slide the back window of the truck open and knock on the window of the camper shell. The windows on the shell are all covered up so nobody can see in, but the girls riding back there can’t see out, either. They slide open the window on their side. I pass the paper bag full of burritos and milk through the hole. They say nothing. I say nothing. Then we both slide the windows shut.

The shipment, one of them, is knocking on the window of the truck. I push it open, and a face is looking at me: TheoAnne or Daverleen, not the littlest one, not Teal.

“Can you pull over? It’s Teal. She’s got the morning sick. Needs some air.”

Bo heard, and the truck is already on the shoulder, already slowing down.

“You got this, Valley,” says Bo.

Lucky me.

When I open the back of the truck, Teal, the littlest one, is hunched and waiting to crawl out. She has the paper bag the food came in in one hand. The bag is soggy and the acid smell of vomit is in the air. I put my hand out to help her down, but she holds the bag out to me instead. I take it and fling it down the road bank into the weeds.

Teal crawls out on her hands and knees and then stands at the edge of the pavement.

“Breathe,” one of the other girls says from where they are still perched in the shadows.

“It’ll pass. It always feels better once you hurl,” says the other voice.

Teal is swallowing, and clenching her teeth, but she does what they tell her to do. She breathes deep and slow.

I walk around to the cab, open the door, and say, “I think this one should ride up front for a while.”

Bo doesn’t say yes.

“I think if she don’t, the whole back there is going to be wall-to-wall barf.”

“Yeah.”

“Up here, she’s less likely to blow — and she can open the window if she needs to, there’s that.”

“Yeah.”

So I put Teal in the front and climb into the back. The air only smells a little sour. I stretch out and get ready to fall asleep, like any normal person would in the dark in the back of the truck.

But then one of the chickens says, “You’re nice.” It’s a weird thing to say.

“You’re nice,” says the other one. “We been talking about it, and you can come live with us if you want to.”

“What?”

“You can be in our family.”

“What about Bo? Can he be in your family too?”

“Don’t think that would work. No. Don’t think so.”

“Why not? He’s nice as me.”

“But he’s a man. He wants to be out in the world. That’s what men do. That’s why I hope my baby is a girl. If she’s a girl, we can be together mostly for always. With boys, you never can tell, but they mostly need to go.”

We wait, parked on the gravel road beside a long lake that stretches from here to Canada. This is as far as we go. Bo crashes on the truck seat. I’d like to go down by the water and stand by the empty edge where the earth and the sky and the water come together. I would like to watch the ripples kiss and bend around the rocks and see how the wind flutters the smooth back of the lake. Can’t do it. If something happens, we might need to move fast, so I sit on the loose gravel by the truck. The chickens are totally quiet in the back; maybe they are sleeping, too. I hear the whine of a chainsaw somewhere. No, not a chainsaw, a bike engine, getting closer.

Might be nothing, but I open the truck door and poke Bo awake. He hears the engine, too, so there’s no need to talk.

It’s an old woman in coveralls riding a four-wheeler hitched to a utility cart. She pulls up behind the truck and stops.

“This it?” I ask.

“Yeah, probably yeah,” says Bo.

“You stay here, then. I’ll let them out.”

The old woman climbs off the machine and stands beside it. When I open the back, the shipment climbs out and runs to her. They all hug, but she shoos them toward the trailer.

“Bye, Valley!” Teal waves.

“Valley watched on us like we were her own sisters,” Daverleen says. But nobody says anything about me going with them, so I don’t have to say no.

Bo waits until the whine of the old woman’s engine has threaded away to silence before he turns the key in the ignition.

“We’ll go for a couple of hours, then I get to sleep. We’ll be back to the Captain’s by tomorrow, then I’m going to sleep some more. Damn it, Valley, we got to get you licensed,” says Bo.

Maybe he says some more too, but my brain is stuck on one thing. We’ll be back to the Captain’s by tomorrow.

There are no paths here, not even places where the animals always go because it’s the quickest and easiest. Here, every way is open and winding around the sagebrush. Here, there’s no place to go: No water calling, no promise of something better. There are no fences, no power lines, not even any jet trails in the sky.

The shadows move as fast as the clouds. The bright wind muffles my ears and makes me pull my sleeves down over my hands. But there is a sound that pierces the wind and pings like radar — ping, ping, ping — until it spills out, calling love out of the air, forging it into a bell that rings like a heart. Meadowlark.

It’s been a long time since I cried. I’ve almost forgotten how. My bones and muscles are a fist around my lungs and heart. I curl down onto myself until I’m hard and heavy as a stone. When Bo finds me, I’m just another rock among the sagebrush.

“Hey, hey, Valley, I’m here.”

I’m here.

Bo gathers me against him, and I push my face into his jacket and cry. I cry until every muscle in my body is tired. Then Bo takes my hand and leads me back to where the truck is waiting.

“Valley, you don’t have to do it.”

That’s true. I’m a free person.

“Revenge isn’t worth it.”

I let myself think about that — about revenge. I imagine standing in front of Captain Nichols’s gate, waiting for him to come close, waiting for him to think I am squirming under his dirty thumb. And then I would destroy him. But I say, “That’s not why I’m doing this. Revenge is a bad reason. It’s a small reason. I’m not doing this for me. This is way bigger than me. You don’t understand yet.”

“Understand what?”

“Understand about the black helicopters.”

“Valley. You know I don’t believe in them? Right? I don’t believe . . .”

“I know. That’s why this has to happen. There are lots of people like you, people who don’t believe. That’s exactly why this needs to happen.” The tires go kachunk-kachunk-kachunk on the seams in the road. We are moving closer to wherever we need to be. The gears are all turning. The pieces are all moving. I say, “You are a part of it now. You should know that. Even if you are afraid, you are a part of it. Someday, when people understand, they will remember you. They won’t remember that you were afraid; the only ones who know that are you and me, and we will both be dead. They will remember that you were brave. You were brave, and you were a part of it. They will know that you helped me when I needed help. You will be a hero, Eric the Boneless. How about that?”