South Village (Ash McKenna) (8 page)

But I’ve been listening, paying attention to body cues. It’s like a game. People carry so much of their story on their body. Katashi is the first to volunteer for a task and also content to wander alone. That makes me like him.

The ritual continues. People share memories of Pete. Nothing too deep or interesting. Nothing that blips on my radar. Happy claptrap. Some more exaltations to Mother Earth or the eternal wind or the dark matter of the universe and blah blah blah.

At the end of it, it’s only me and Katashi who haven’t spoken. Katashi gets a pass for not speaking English. I get a pass because no one expects me to contribute. It’s not that I don’t believe in what they’re doing. But I never participate in the circle. If we’re all going to stand around and talk about what we’re thankful for, well, what part of the broken shards of my life do I have to be thankful for?

At the end Tibo lets go of Cannabelle and Gideon and walks to the center of the circle. “Let’s eat. And please, if anyone needs anything, or has a concern, please come see me. I’ll be here until the last person leaves.”

The circle breaks apart. Me and Aesop head for the kitchen, where the trays have cooled down enough that we can haul them out to the serving table bare-handed. We set them up alongside a pile of wooden plates and metal utensils and pull back the aluminum foil.

The potatoes browned nicely, and it smells real damn good. Aesop dumps a Tupperware container of his dressing on the salad and tosses it with his hands. As he does this, he looks up at the dry erase board hanging over the food, makes sure all the ingredients are listed. A reference for those with allergies and weird eating habits.

Once the food is ready, we step away. No one would probably be bothered if we went first, but we both like to wait until everyone has filled their plates. It’s one of the reasons I think Aesop is probably a good person, even though we barely speak about anything other than cooking.

When everyone’s gone up and sat down, I get my plate and take a hefty scoop of the shepherd’s pie and a bit of the salad and go to the far picnic table, at the edge of the clearing. The food is good. It’d be nice to have some meat, but I’ve lost a little weight since I got here, and it’s weight I probably needed to lose anyway. Can’t feel bad about that.

It’s dark now, dinner starting way later than normal given the circumstances. The clearing is lit blue and orange. Blue by some solar-powered lights that’ll last another four hours or so on the juice they sucked up today. Orange by the fire, three feet high, light dancing off the people assembled close to it.

No one here looks like a killer.

Tibo’s got to be right. I’m overthinking it. That’s what I do. I build narratives. I need things to make sense in my head. And apparently the only thing that makes sense is for everything to be a conspiracy. For people to be uniformly awful no matter where you go or what you do.

Maybe I bore too easily.

Maybe nothing was moved on the bus.

Maybe I closed the folder in the reverse direction without thinking about it. It was dark this morning when I closed it and I was half-asleep.

Still. I pull the pamphlet out of my pocket, look at the numbers scrawled on the back. I take a look at the fire.

The numbers could be a code.

What else would they be? The way the numbers are spaced, it certainly seems to correspond to words. I look for one that’s a combination of three letters, figure if I can crack ‘the’ maybe I can chip away at the rest. But that doesn’t work. I look for the most common number, thinking maybe it’s the letter ‘e’ because that’s the most common letter, and that doesn’t seem to bear out.

I am not a code breaker, in case there was any question of that.

“Nice job tonight.”

I look up and Job is standing over me, barefoot in jeans and a flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his muscled biceps. His head is meticulously shaved, which contrasts with his long, thick, carefully coiffed beard. He smells a bit like shit, which I can’t really blame him for. He handles the outhouses. It’s a dirty job. He’s the only one who seems to want to do it.

I nod at him, and he lingers. I want to tell him to leave when Cannabelle comes shuffling through the dirt toward me, suddenly assuming this is a party.

“You’re welcome,” I tell Job, and he walks off. Cannabelle climbs on top of the table next to me. She doesn’t say anything as she balances her plate on her laps and eats.

After she demolishes half the plate she says, “Food is good tonight.”

“Thanks.”

“This is weird, right? This whole thing?”

“Yup.”

“Is there something someone’s not telling us? I feel like there’s something someone’s not telling us.”

I look over at Cannabelle, who’s looking out at the fire, chewing. Another person I’ve barely interacted with in my time here. And yet. She’s as curious about this as I am. And maybe she senses that. I consider telling her about the rope. But I’ve seen how messages spread through this place. Sunny got a rash from some fire ants and the next thing people were whispering that she caught an STD and that the outhouses weren’t safe and suddenly people were shitting in the woods. Our mock society falls apart with a stiff wind.

“Not sure,” I tell her.

“You think maybe what happened to Pete wasn’t an accident.”

It’s not a question.

“I don’t know what I think,” I tell her.

“Pete was a weird dude.”

She goes back to eating. Cleans the plate, licks off the remnants of food, and places it next to her. She sits there holding a mason jar full of water between her hands, her fingers loaded with rings. She clicks them against the glass, short taps mixed with long taps.

She wants to tell me something.

“How was Pete a weird dude?” I ask.

“I see things up in the trees.”

I glance up. The tops of the trees are veiled in darkness. But Cannabelle goes up empty-handed and comes down with bud and sweet leaf. Apparently there’s an entire grow rig up there, something out of sight but close to the sun. I’ve been curious to see how it works. I’m less curious to know what it feels like to fall from up there and break my neck.

“What do you see from up in the trees?” I ask.

“I see Pete. He runs around a lot, like he’s a spy on a mission.”

“Where to?”

“Not sure.” She takes a long sip. “I don’t follow him. That wouldn’t be cool.”

“You see everything here, right?”

“Just about.”

“How’d he been the past few days? Anything of note?”

“He was carrying a book everywhere. Outhouse, dinner, on walks. He always had this book sticking out of his pocket.”

“What book?”

“
The Monkey Wrench Gang
.”

“I don’t know that one.”

“We have it in the library.”

It’s full black beyond the trees. The library lights don’t get turned on at night, and I don’t like fucking around with the candles in there. I don’t want to be the guy who sets the place on fire.

“I’ll look tomorrow,” I tell her. “Thanks.”

Marx crosses our field of vision. I nod toward him. “What’s that asshole’s deal?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s his story?”

“You don’t know about his family,” she says.

“What about them?”

“Died in a fire. He was a kid. Off visiting his grandparents, and his parents were at a cabin, and there was a forest fire. Turned out there was this tree-clearing operation and they did some careless thing that started it.”

Huh. That casts Marx in a new light. I lost my dad to a mistake someone else made. I know what that can twist you into. Not that it’s an excuse. It certainly wasn’t for me.

But if anything is going to push you into a lifestyle of hard activism, that would be it. And it would be hypocritical to hold that against him. He just needs to learn to control his anger before it controls him.

“Well,” I tell her. “That explains some stuff.”

She nods. “Want seconds?”

“No, I’m good.”

She dashes off toward the food table.

I look at the numbers on the pamphlet one last time, tear off that page, stuff it in my pocket, walk past the fire, throw the rest of the pamphlet onto the nest of flames. Watch as the corners black and curl. The older couple sitting on a log by the fire—I think their names are Ginger and Robert—are cuddled up against a log, making out like teenagers, not paying attention to me.

I wait until the pamphlet is all the way burned up before moving on. Dump my empty plate and utensils into the gray wash bin.

With dinner mostly finished, people are assembling toward the main cluster of picnic tables. Someone pulls out Monopoly and they pair off into two-person teams. Packages of loose tobacco and rolling papers come out. I feel the tug of nicotine, my brain reminding me what I’m missing.

That’s one of the nice things about this place. Too hard to go out for smokes. I don’t want to pay to stockpile them. And I can’t smoke a rolled cigarette without wanting to puke. The first few weeks were rough, and I may or may not have thrown a chair at someone during a nic fit, but now I rarely even get the urge.

Maybe it’s the fresh air. Maybe it’s all the walking and the physical labor, and that feeling I sometimes get of trying to breathe through a wet sock, or in my case, a pair of shredded lungs.

That was my sacrifice. I needed something. A life without vice is a life where you have to face the things those vices otherwise would have covered up.

Anyway, I’ve still got my whiskey.

Aesop appears next to me. He nods toward the Monopoly setup. “You want in on the game?”

“Not tonight.”

“C’mon man. You should play.”

“I play Monopoly I’ll end up flipping the table. That is not a game for people with anger management issues.”

“Will you at least stay out with us? If ever there was a night that we all needed to be together, this is it.”

“Goodnight.”

He sighs, more hurt than angry. “Night.”

I grab a pink flashlight from the flashlight bin and head into the woods, the sound and the light fading behind me, until I’m on a walkway far enough out that I can click off the light and the world is so dark I can’t see a thing. Not my hand in front of my face, not the ground under my feet, not the trees looming over me. Not even the stars. The canopy is too thick.

Of course, as soon as I turn the light off, as soon as it’s nothing but dark, I see it. Like my vision switched over to an old movie. The hole, and Wilson’s body crumbled into it, rainwater pooling where his arm was pressed up against the wall of it. His glass doll eyes, staring out at nothing, and the reason for that was me.

The wave hits.

Pushing me under. Roaring in my ears, threatening to pull me down into the dark. Filling my eyes and nose and throat. I’m tumbling, can’t tell up from down.

I fumble with the flashlight, try to flick the plastic button on the side to turn it on, drop it. It clatters to the ground and I fall to my knees, sweeping my hands around, trying to find it. By the time I do, I’m crying. Still not breathing, my lungs about to burst.

And then it’s there, in my hands. I click it on and I’m in the woods. A hostel in the middle of Georgia. Not underwater. Not being pulled deeper. Just in the woods.

I pull my legs up and sit there for a bit until I’ve calmed down. Until my chest doesn’t feel like it’s swelling with water.

Then I get up and walk.

No monster bugs on the steps into the bus. I do a quick sweep with the flashlight when I get in, to make sure none of them broke in with plans to kill me while I was out. This is a thing that concerns me. I pull the cord that turns on the rope light running along the edges of the ceiling. The sun was good today. The solar panels soaked up enough I could squeak out a few hours of juice, not that I plan to be up long.

Underneath the bunk there are two empty plastic whiskey jugs, plus the one on the table that’s half-full. I climb on top of the bunk and take a long, deep swig. It’s flat and sharp and hot.

Man. Nothing says rock bottom like plastic jug whiskey.

I look around at the battered metal on the inside of the bus, at my little pile of belongings. My ridiculous suspicions and my sad, quiet evening alone. My head already swimming a little. I reach up and turn off the light so that it’s pitch black. A slight breeze drifts through the netted window, along with the sound of insects and rustling leaves.

And those two sets of eyes, peeking through the window.

The silence is all-encompassing. Living in New York City, you live with the feeling of a television being on in the next room. An electric hum you can’t hear, but you can feel, even when it’s quiet. Even in Portland there was a little of that. The hum never stops. I always wondered what I would learn about myself when the humming stopped and the world went silent and I couldn’t hear anything but what’s inside myself. The things the hum was covering.

I don’t like it.

The jug of whiskey seems heavy enough that maybe I’ll sleep through the night. But I’m going to need to pick up more. I take another pull and pray it’s enough to drown out my dreams.

M
y mouth tastes like I’ve been sucking on a dirty dishrag and my skull is a size too small. I turn my head and the muscles in my neck tighten in protest.