No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) (15 page)

“Bart, please!” Isabella said, as Bart read
ied to argue further.

Bart looked down at his wife, filled with pain and concern.  Gail
sensed him muffling his anger and resentment, all in the name of protecting his wife.  His pause stretched long, and Gail didn’t interrupt his thoughts.

Isabella smiled up at him as he relaxed and let the anger go.

“Will you let Isabella leave?” he said.  “She doesn’t need to suffer if I happen to say something that makes you mad.”

So maybe that anger wasn
’t gone, but Gail smiled and nodded anyway.

Isabella fled, but not before pausing for a
hostile glance at Gail.  Gail spent the next hour sitting on the Ebener porch swing with Bart asking questions.

Bart didn
’t like her.  He didn’t like her age, her sex and her personal style, and mostly he didn’t like what Gail did to his wife.  But he answered.

---

Call after eleven, the note said.  Well, it was after eleven.  Gail and her new research crew had been attempting to find a Focus to contact, which turned out to be more difficult than any of them imagined.  First, finding phone numbers for Focuses was nearly impossible; most Focus households spent the extra money to keep their phone numbers unlisted.  Second, when they were able to find a phone number, they could never get through to the Focus.  “Sorry, you’re not on the list” was the most common response.  Third, Van hadn’t been any use, refusing to help this bit of research, staying icily absent from her life.

Sylvie had found, of all things, a reference to a Focus Cottsfield associated with a traveling group of performers, now attending the Jackson County Fair and doing whatever performances they did.  Well, Jackson was a little over a half hour drive
away, and sounded perfect for Gail.  She wanted to visit.  Given their earlier problems with phone calls, Gail decided that showing up unannounced might be a problem.  Sylvie and Melanie had worked the phones, leaving a message at the County Fair, and finally made real contact with a member of the Cottsfield household.

Thus, the
‘call after eleven’ note.

Gail bit her lip in nervousness
as she sat at the kitchen table and watched the hands on the ceramic sun clock above the cabinets next to the kitchen sink.  Melanie sat across from her, her nose buried in the coffee-stained remains of the day’s Free Press. Kurt paced. Sylvie curled up on the floor and snored.  Gail hadn’t ever talked to another Focus besides Wini Adkins, and she needed this conversation to go better than that one had.  The odds didn’t look good.  According to one quote the Witch Bitch found, “…talking to another hollow-eyed wastrel of the self-proclaimed ‘hedonist household’ of Focus Cottsfield…”, the household was not well adjusted.  They argued endlessly and were constantly petty with each other.

Neither Gail nor her small research team
had any idea what a ‘hedonist household’ was, as this was the only reference to this household model they had found.  Back in the tent, they had dedicated page three of their three by four foot scribble pad of collated Transform notes to household models.  They had identified five by name, the juice mover, charismatic, military, hedonist and weak Focus models.  They knew more about the others, and had speculated and wrote wry notes to each other on the scribble pad about each.  Gail thought of the models, in order, as chattel slavery, va-va-voom, seig heil, drug pusher and
mine
.  She had the least confidence in their hedonist model speculations, because of lack of data.

Gail placed the call, and a woman picked up.

“My name is Focus Gail Rickenbach, and I’m looking for Focus Cottsfield.”

“Well, my Focus doesn
’t want to talk with you,” the woman said.  As the call was to the County Fair offices, Gail had expected a representative from the County Fair to pick up the phone.  “My Focus has no interested in dealing with some pathetic new Focus outside of the normal Focus mentoring channels.  We have our own problems, and if you have any problems, that’s what the mentoring program is for.  If you think differently, take up your issues with Focus Adkins.”  Click.

Gail sucked air, once, twice, and again.  Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes, and Melanie moaned in pain.  Gail put everyone
’s juice back and turned to her crew.  “I’m supposed to talk to Focus Adkins if I ever want to talk to another Focus,” Gail said.  Her hands shook, and a dark depression settled on her.  Melanie groaned at the news, while Kurt cursed mightily.

She and her household were utterly alone.

---

“So, how did you get talked into this?” Sylvie said.  Gail, a bandanna around her head, was on her hands and knees, scrubbing around the edges of the kitchen.  Her torn jeans were already soaked.  She couldn
’t believe how quickly the edges of the kitchen floor accumulated caked muck; the cleaning crew washed the floor three times a day, but they scrubbed harder in the middle of the floor than around the edges.

“I volunteered,” Gail said.

“Yah, right,” Sylvie said.  She knelt down on the floor to help Gail scrub.  “You put your name on the list and, let me guess, one of our wonderful normal men volunteered our Focus to scrub floors.”

Gail nodded.  Her Focus enhancements improved her memory, and she was sure Virgil Conte was the one who
had volunteered her.  “I had been working with Betha, on the cooking, and noticed that nobody was managing the purchase of household supplies.  Except for the large food purchases, people are buying things individually, whenever the need shows up.  So I started to organize the purchasing, just an outline of how we might do it better, and, boom, scrubbing floors.”  Sylvie was talking to her almost like the old friend she had always been, and Gail felt a happy warmth she almost translated into a juice bounce for Sylvie, except she wondered how much was Sylvie the friend and how much was Sylvie the Transform doing the Focus suck up routine.  The Focus suck up routine would be a first for Sylvie, though.  Of all Gail’s Transforms, Sylvie always seemed to be the one willing to argue with her.

“You got too near the money.”

Gail wiped a stray hair out of her eyes – she, truthfully, wasn’t good at this bandanna stuff.  “I got too near the money.”  She also hadn’t had the intestinal fortitude necessary to push the issue.  She spent most of her time and attention these days practicing the management of her Transforms’ juice counts.  The work was tiring and exhausting, and difficult to manage around her own juice issues, the headaches and the depression.  Her practice did seem to go better after she spent some time scrubbing floors, though, or when she had been working on organizing the supply purchases.  Some was the benefits of distraction, she suspected.  She also suspected hard physical labor helped as well.  Anything was better than lying around on her cot.

“You should be doing something like the supply purchasing,” Sylvie said.  “You
’ve always been good at organization.”  Gail shrugged.  She didn’t think of herself as good at organizing.  The problem was that other people just didn’t seem to understand how to organize.

“They don
’t like it when I do,” she said.  “Have you noticed how not only women but also the male Transforms have been shut out of the household leadership?”

“Uh huh.”  Sylvie wrung out her washcloth in the rinse bucket, grabbed the scrub brush, and went after a nasty section of floor, the corner nearest the sink.  “I don
’t like it at all.”

Gail
grunted and scrubbed, wondering what she could do about it.  That is, this side of using the juice weapon to take over the household. “Can we stage a revolution?” Sylvie said, her eyes angry narrow.  “Now?”  Gail could practically see an image in Sylvie’s head, of Bart on his hands and knees, in an apron, scrubbing the kitchen floor.

Gail shook her head.  “I don
’t see how to do that without me ending up as Fuehrer Rickenbach.”  That would lead her right into Focus Adkins’ shoes.  “We need to be more subtle.”  She smiled at Sylvie.  “I need your help, though, in addition to the research biz.”

“I can do subtle,” Sylvie said.  “What do you want?”

“More eyes and ears,” she said.  “Information is power.”  Spoken like a true revolutionary, or, at least, what she thought a revolutionary might say.

“You want me to be a spy?  No problem,” Sylvie said.

Gail smiled.

“…and the vote carries,” Bart said.  His expression soured, as if he had just swallowed a lemon.  Virgil’s face was beet red, but he didn’t say anything. He just stared at a silk screen picture of birches in winter on the far wall.

The vote had been over Gail
’s bulk purchase proposal.  The household had decided that everyone would contribute a little more money to the household account for bulk purchases.  Bart and his cronies would still control the money, but Gail and Helen would be in charge of figuring out how many supplies the household needed, and arranging the purchases.  Sylvie’s spying had given Gail the information she needed; Sylvie had learned that other people shared their concerns, and that the votes were there for this change in household organization.

Helen had provided the
money numbers; she had found that pooling the purchasing would save money, leaving the household account with a little more coming in every week.

Gail wasn
’t happy with the vote.  Sylvie’s head count indicated they would get about 60% of the vote, but they had won almost unanimously.  She had the uncomfortable sensation that many people voted for her plan just because it was her plan.

After the meeting ended,
Gail waited until Virgil finished his grousing with Bart and his cronies, and then as he started to leave the living room with Tricia, she corralled him.

“Virgil, I think it
’s time I get a look at the books,” Gail said.  “It’s going to be very hard for either Helen or I to plan…”

“No,” Virgil said.  Tricia backed
away, grimacing in pain.  Gail didn’t bother to fix Tricia’s juice, unhappy both with Virgil and with Tricia.  “That’s my business, household business, not yours.  He glared at her, an angry furrow deepening between his eyebrows.  “You need to do some thinking yourself, Gail.  Your meddling isn’t winning you any friends among the people who count, and if you aren’t careful, you might come to learn that there are much worse things than scrubbing floors.  Much worse.”  Virgil twirled, took Tricia’s shaking arm, and stalked off through the kitchen.

Gail fixed Tricia
’s juice count as she shivered and backed away, her knees wobbly, her breathing ragged.  Virgil had threatened her!  Not directly, but a threat nevertheless.  The man was a fungus, nasty enough to make her skin crawl.

She didn
’t know what to do, other than not give in to his veiled threats.  The idea she might back down never entered her mind.

“Van, what do you think of Virgil Conte?” she asked.  They were lying together on Van’s cot.  Gail had just faked another orgasm and so they were lying in a puddle of sweat in the late evening heat.  Gail felt a little bad about the fake orgasm and the preceding pretense of desire, but if her white lies kept Van from getting more distant, they were a small price to pay.  She did enjoy the comfort of lying entwined with him afterwards, and she needed to do something to reduce the cold wind blowing through their relationship.

“Virgil?  He
’s a little weasel, but otherwise okay,” Van said.

“Hmm.”

“Why?”

“I
’ve been trying to get a look at the accounting books, and he won’t let me.”

“So you think he
’s trying to hide something?”

Gail nestled closer.

“That’s what I want to find out.”

Van pulled back from her.  “It
’s too hot,” he said.

“It wasn
’t too hot a few minutes ago,” she said with a smile.

“That
’s different,” he said, exasperation creeping into his voice.  “So what are you going to do about it?”

“About the heat?  I guess I
’m responsible for a lot of things, but the heat is a little beyond me.”  Gail didn’t want to say anything, but these days she thought anything over 70 too warm, and over 80 just plain disgusting.  She chalked it up to yet another screwy transformation change she wasn’t pleased about.

Van
waited, unmoving.  Today, he didn’t appreciate her humor.

“Ohhhh, you mean Virgil,” she said.  “Push the issue, I guess.  I
’ll go get Bart, and if we go see him together, he’ll have to show us the books.”

“You think Bart will help you?  He doesn
’t like you, and besides that, every time you do something like this, you’re eating away at his position.”  More exasperation.  She knew not to ask.  She already knew he thought she should just ‘do something’, likely harsh, that would fix the situation.

Gail
twisted to her back and stared up at the flimsy plywood ceiling supporting their leaky tent canvas.  “Too true, but I think I’m winning him over with what I am doing.”  Bart hadn’t liked the bulk purchase program or the vote, because he didn’t like other people taking the initiative.  After the vote, and after he had a chance to think over the benefits of bulk purchasing, he had come around.  “Besides, he now knows that if any issues come down to a vote, I’ll win.  Too many of the Transforms are going to vote for me if I push any issue.”