South Village (Ash McKenna) (29 page)

And my gun empty.

This whole thing sucks.

Then I get an idea. It’s a ridiculous idea, but that’s better than no idea.

“Oh hey look it’s the cops,” I say, looking at a blank point down the road, beyond Marx and Lanky.

The two of them turn to look.

Dummies.

Aesop follows my lead. He launches himself into Marx at the same time I dive forward and swing the shotgun like a bat, catching Lanky across the face. He goes cross-eyed and hits the mud. I pull the gun away from him as he falls. Tibo is on him quick with the zip ties. I turn to Aesop. The gun got thrown wide, and he and Marx are untangling from each other.

Marx and Aesop get standing across from each other, both of them covered in thick patches of mud. I slide in next to Aesop.

“I can’t believe that actually worked,” he says.

“Sometimes you have to keep it simple,” I tell him. “Now, should we shoot rock-paper-scissors on this?”

“Why don’t you take it,” he says.

“How generous.” I turn to Marx. “Before we start I need to know. Did you kill Cannabelle?”

“I had no choice.”

My body fills with rage like water rushing to fill an empty space. The image of Cannabelle lying on the ground comes back to me. Dead like dead doesn’t look in the movies. Sweet to me when she had no reason to be.

“There is always a choice,” I tell him.

He growls and comes at me fast. I move to the side and drive my fist into his stomach as hard as I can. He doubles over, hits his knees, falls on his hands. Pukes on the ground. I kick him in the stomach to flip him over, take a knee on the ground, and drive my fist into his face.

Seems he’s not as tough as he presented himself.

I’ve gone against sloppy drunks with more fight in them. But I shouldn’t have expected much from a pampered rich kid pretending to be a freedom fighter.

I reach my fist back, ready to hit him again.

Remember what happened the last time I let this feeling take over.

“There is always a choice,” I tell him.

I get up, turn him over, press his face into the mud. Tibo binds his hands. I step out to the road and see the vague form of a van coming our way.

“Finally, the fucking cavalry,” I say.

Aesop says, “I’m going to check and see what they did to the tower. You see about the hostages.”

He takes off at a run and I duck my head into the trailer, see a black guy and a white guy in gray uniforms, tied up to chairs and blindfolded, with heavy headphones stuck over their ears. The kind construction guys wear when they’re jackhammering. They don’t look to be in pain or distress. I’m about to go inside and free them when the sheriff’s van pulls up. Ford jumps out of the driver’s seat, gun in his hand, pointed at the ground. Corey climbs out of the passenger’s seat, cradling a shotgun.

“What the hell happened here?” Ford asks.

Aesop comes back up to us, leading the three people we tied up at the derrick, all of whom step underneath an awning of a trailer to get out of the rain.

“None of these fucking idiots know how to blow anything up,” Aesop says. “They stacked propane tanks and bags of fertilizer up and they were going to light it on fire. That’s not how bombs work. They didn’t even pick the right kind of fertilizer.”

“Will someone please explain to me what in the fresh fuck is going on?” Ford asks.

We take turns, each of us filling in parts of the story. The FBI raid. The Soldiers of Gaia. The plot to overthrow the camp. The stash of weapons and Cannabelle’s death.

No one says anything about Pete.

I think we’re going to chalk that up to being an accident.

Technically, it was.

When we get through it Ford nods, walks around the tied up folks.

“Really wish you kids had clued me into this sooner,” he says. “Y’all cut it a little close. Especially wish you told me about those FBI assholes. It’s nice to know when they’re fucking things up in my backyard.”

“Speaking of, why hasn’t the FBI stormed in here?” I ask.

“I didn’t call them,” Ford says.

“Why not?” Tibo asks.

“Because this is a win for the home team. I don’t want them taking the credit,” he says, gazing up at the fracking derrick. “You boys, come with me.”

“What about the guards?” I ask.

“If they’re safe then they can sit another minute or two.”

When we’re out of earshot of the Soldiers, he asks, “What are we going to do about this?”

“What do you mean?” Tibo asks.

“I mean these fucking things are bad news, son,” he says, nodding toward the derrick. “I don’t want my sink turned into a fucking flamethrower.”

“That’s a whole other battle,” Aesop says.

“Right,” Ford says, adjusting his cap against the rain. “What I’m saying is that the community is really upset about this. And they should be. There is a very good chance people are going to suffer because of this thing. It’d been better if it didn’t go up in the first place. Almost makes me feel bad. Like maybe if we didn’t arrive in time, they would have taken it down.”

“Not with the gear they were using,” Aesop says.

“Do you not get what I’m saying, son?” Ford asks, smiling. “How about I put it in terms you’ll understand.” He nods toward the pickup truck that Marx drove up in. “That car belongs to them? It’d do a fair bit of damage if it crashed into that. Set these assholes back real good. Best part is, no one gets hurt and the community comes out of it with their land intact. It’s too bad we didn’t get here in time to stop it. Right, Assistant Sheriff Corey?”

“Flame thrower sinks, you say?” Corey asks.

“Yes, son. That’s not the kind of thing I want to wake up to in the morning.” Ford looks at the derrick again. “Listen to me carefully, boys. There’s nothing around that monstrosity over there, nothing with your prints on it? Any people there?”

Aesop shakes his head.

“Good. Now, I’m glad we brought the van. I’m going to load these people into the back. We’re going to radio someone to meet us at the bottom of the road to pick us up. Since you say the guards aren’t in distress, we’ll just come back for them. What happens between now and then, I can’t right say. That thing was a flaming wreck when I got here. You catch me?”

“Got it,” Tibo says.

He shakes our hands each in turn.

“I’m not saying these dumb kids were right,” Ford says. “I don’t want to endorse their plan. But sometimes a man has to step up and take the shot that’s been afforded him, know what I mean?”

“Yes, sir,” I tell him.

He tips his cap at me and heads back, loads everyone into the van, all of them shooting us dirty looks. Magda says, “Tools of fascism.”

“Oh shut up,” Ford says. “If anything we’re the tools of a totalitarian government, and even that’s hyperbole at best.”

Ford gets into the car with Corey and they drive off. I walk toward the pickup truck with Tibo and Aesop and ask, “Which one of us is going to do the honors?”

“C’mon,” Aesop says to Tibo. “Find a cinder block or something.”

Aesop goes to the car, turns it on, and puts it in neutral. Then he lashes his belt to the steering wheel. Tibo waddles over carrying a cinder block, which he hands to Aesop, who drops it onto the gas pedal. The engine races.

“Stand back,” he says.

He climbs into the car and shifts it into drive. It leaps forward, headed for the tower. After twenty or thirty feet, after it seems it’s going to stay straight, he dives out, hits the ground hard, and rolls. Tibo and I run over to him, to make sure he’s okay, just as the truck smashes into the concrete base, crumbling the wall, the front flattening.

Aesop gets up, shaking it out.

We watch the wreck for a second, a little disappointed that it didn’t do more damage. The car is still running, wheels spinning in the mud, wisps of black smoke coming out of the engine.

“Well that’s too bed,” Aesop says.

And then the car explodes.

That leads to three or four bigger explosions. I can feel the pulse of them pushing through my body, the heat washing across us like a wave. It throws thick plumes of smoke into the air and we watch it burn for a few minutes. The part of me raised by my dad goes into alarm mode, wanting to pull out my phone and call emergency services.

But I don’t have to. We did this.

“You know what this means?” Aesop asks. “We’re technically terrorists.”

“No, we’re not,” I tell him. “This is how you do a good thing a bad way. I hope the Soldiers aren’t able to claim credit for this.”

“I suspect Ford will work something out,” Aesop says.

“Guys. Why the fuck are we still here?” Tibo asks.

“Good point,” I say.

And we take off for the tree line.

T
he sun comes out. None of us speak. There’s not much to say. I think we’re all carrying the explosion of the fracking derrick in our chests. It was something I don’t think any of us were really ready for.

And afterward, we’re shocked at the efficiency with which we just did something like several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage.

A little bit down the road, we pass a long line of black, shiny cars, like beetles gliding down the road. Hopefully the FBI is off to the crime scene and away from South Village for good.

Aesop pulls into the front entrance and over the bridge, and once we’re parked, Tibo jumps out of the car, off no doubt to see where he’s needed and start moving pieces back into place. Aesop says to me, “We really ought to go check on Gideon.”

“Do we have to?” I ask.

“You can slap him around a little if he’s still there.”

“That works.”

We walk in silence, climbing onto the boardwalk and cutting through the woods. I stop at a board that says:
Go where the peace is.
Tap it with my toe. Keep walking.

After we pass the sign for Sunny and Moony’s place, he says, “I’m happy to see that you’re feeling better.”

I stop. After a moment he senses this and he stops too, turning around to face me. The two of us, standing in the middle of the woods, alone and quiet.

“What you said,” I tell him. “About knowing you can die. About all this being fragile. It helped. I don’t know why. It just did. And I want to thank you for that.”

He smiles. It’s an easy, comfortable smile.

“I’m glad to hear that,” he says. “Truthfully, sometimes I think it’s less about the message and more about knowing you’re not carrying shit by yourself. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I think I do. I just… I guess I wasn’t used to people being nice to me. But you, and Cannabelle, and even Tibo, even though he got frustrated with me.”

“I know you think you’re a bad person,” Aesop says. “But you’re not. You could have done anything when you got here. You could have taken permanent machete duty and been by yourself all day. But you chose to cook. You chose to feed people. Even at your darkest, you picked a task that would mean giving comfort and nourishment to other people.”

Aesop looks up into the canopy, then down at the ground. Kicks at a board.

“Do you know why I cook?” he asks. “It’s not because I have any particular affinity for it. It’s just… I told you I saw some shit. I had a hard time when I came home. And cooking was something I picked up that covered up all those bad feelings. It gave me a sense of purpose. Across all cultures, across all demographics, food and hospitality are a shared bond. You sit down and break bread with strangers, it’s a way of communicating ourselves. After what I did, it feels important to use my hands to create something. To feed people. Do you understand what I mean?”

I sniff and look down, and he’s about to say something else when I dive forward, put my arms around him. I’m afraid that after I leave I will never see him again but this has been important to me, and I want him to know that, but I don’t know how to say it.

So I hold him, and hide my face so he can’t see that I’m close to crying. He hugs me back and we stay like that until finally he pulls back a little and says, “C’mon dude, lay off the theatrics. All you have to do is buy me a drink.”

I laugh and we disengage. Walk some more. Get to the spot where we left Gideon, and he’s gone. Check the back road, and the car with the weapons in the trunk is gone, too.

We head back toward the main camp and Aesop says, “C’mon, I want to show you something.”

He leads me to the artist hut, and the painting that’s hanging, untouched by the raid, safe from the elements. He opens up a beer cooler and takes out jars of paint, arranging them carefully on an open table. I step to the painting. Cannabelle was the last person I saw working on it.

A swirl of colors, like a wave curling up, one side of the wave a treescape, the other side of the wave a starscape. They come together like they’re part of the same scene, but encroaching on each other in small measures. Trying to find a middle ground between two different stories.

Aesop hands me a jar of paint that’s white with a tiny bit of blue mixed in so it’s tinted. He nods toward the starscape.

“Go ahead,” he says. “The sky could use a couple more stars.”

“Are you sure? This was Cannabelle’s.”

“This is everybody’s. Do you know how long this has been here?”