Swarm (22 page)

“This is it,” Margo said. “This is all there is: right fucking now.”

“Live in the moment?” Walter said sarcastically.

Margo stuck her tongue out at him. Under the table, his knee jumped, making the whole table tremble. It was like being in a treehouse, susceptible to wind or freak storm. My stomach churned. I braced myself against the table's edge and he looked at me and said, “I'm guessing we busted your cherry.”

I ignored him, but he kept going.

“Your first protest,” Walter said against the scratch and flare of a match.

“No,” I said, although it was. I'd seen them before, from a distance, staring down streets at the bloom of tear gas in a far-off intersection. Close enough, I'd always thought, uncertain what they were even trying to accomplish. I had a job. I had food. That's what I thought then. Margo made a face.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Good for you,” said Walter. “A good girl like you.”

“She wasn't so good last night,” said Margo. I crossed my arms, slouched deeper into the seat, waved the drift of smoke away from my face. I didn't like them talking about me as if they knew exactly who I was, as if all that defined me was the swing of my moral compass.

“I do what I want,” I said.

“Ooohhh,” said Walter.

“And what do you want?” Marvin asked.

They were all looking at me: three sets of eyes, eager for something. Around us was a babble of conversation, voices raised over the music. Most of the people there were from the protest, their black hoods slackened, bandanas slouched around their necks. In the corner, a couple was making out.

I pulled the cigarette out of Margo's grip. Took a deep, long drag. The others relaxed into laughter.

“Are we ordering?” Margo asked.

“Get some fucking food,” said Walter. The table shook as he turned to Marvin. “It's on you, right?” I wondered about my money for the salvage job, if I'd ever get it. I started to ask when Walter stood up. “Beer's on this guy,” he shouted, and people cheered.

“Fuck off,” Marvin said to Walter.

“You don't want to share your allowance? Donate to the grand hope of humankind.”

“What's your problem?” Marvin asked.

Walter shrugged.

“Keep it the fuck down then,” Marvin said in a harsh whisper.

Margo tried to placate him. “We're on the same team,” she said, her hand reaching to him under the table.

“Yeah,” Walter said. “Sure.”

“Well, what the fuck do you want?” said Marvin.

“Get a goddamn move on. Deliver the same destruction that's been dealt.”

Marvin crushed his cigarette out. “That's not what it's about.”

“What's it about?” I asked quietly because I thought the question made me look stupid.

Marvin and Walter spoke at the same time. “Pushing forward,” Marvin said, but Walter's voice was louder: “Tearing down.”

In the silence that followed, a server approached our table and Margo ordered beer and onion rings. Marvin's eyes hovered over the waitress, wary. I glanced at her and saw she was pretty: black hair shorn on one side of her head, long and glossy on the other.
I probably look like shit
, I thought. My eyes still stung, were likely red. With my fingers, I combed out my hair, which was flattened to my skull.

When she left, Marvin twitched his head toward the patio crowd. “We all want the same thing.”

“These idiots?” Walter yelled, loud enough that several people looked at us. Margo stared down at the table, her lips set in a tight, embarrassed smile. “They're not thinking end games. They're giving the cops a job; they're giving their moms and aunties something to tsk at on
TV
. They're having fun.” His fist slammed on the table so hard that the glass ashtray jumped, landing again with a loud thump.

“We need full system overload. Re-fucking-start.”

Marvin lit another cigarette, his shoulders hunched around his ears like a turtle trying to pull in its head. Walter took it from him and Marvin let him have it, hoping, I think, that it would silence him. As we sat there, waiting for the food, Walter's cigarette burned to a pillar of ash in his artificial hand. Any slight movement and it would shatter.

“Humanity's renewed through violence,” he muttered after a while, but he seemed bored, reciting the phrase by rote. I remembered Marvin saying it, explaining his sudden, senseless act at the travel agency.

“Are you trying to educate her?” Marvin asked.

Walter lifted his dull eyes from the table and they flooded with a manic sparkle. “I was telling the ladies,” he said, lifting his metal hand. His cigarette fell to dust. “Fuck,” he said and dropped the filter on the ground.

“Ladies.” Margo sneered and rolled her eyes as she reached for the beer. I stood up. “Going to powder your nose?” she asked, and I nodded, relieved when she didn't follow.

Inside
the bar, I stood for a minute to let my vision adjust. When the blackness lightened to a deep, fuzzy grey, I walked past the broken pay phones covered in grubby stickers and swung through the red door marked
FEMMES FATALES
. For a long time I'd been ignoring what was right in front of me, but the past twenty-four hours had dragged me deep into the centre. There was no more denial. It almost made me laugh: the thought of the three of them, creeping through the night, lighting fuses, running away as the long, squiggly lines burned down like sparklers. Jump Ship.

On the toilet, I pushed my hands against my face and sat for a moment, pressing my fingers against my eyelids, watching the weird kaleidoscope of colour and pattern as I'd done as a child. I thought about our farm, the day the letter came. The teachers were on strike so I was home. My father was downtown trying to talk the Co-op into selling him seed at cost. That spring, the bank had given my parents half of what they usually got. My mother had to sign for the letter, her hands shaking. There was only one way things could have gone before she ripped the envelope open and that was millions of dollars for oil rights. Instead, it was a notice of foreclosure. For non-payment of bills, the paper said, lying on the floor where my mother let it fall.

They gave up. Packed. Pulled dusty oak chairs out of the attic. Hired an auctioneer. Antique vinyl records, my grandmother's good china, all sold to the highest bidder. After we moved into the nearby town, my mother got seasonal work sorting peanuts at a plantation. Her hands those first days so red and raw. My father stayed home, the burgundy drapes drawn in our apartment's three rooms, convinced that the government had stolen his land. He waited for derricks to appear in the fields, their steel heads bobbing. He drove past his former crops at all hours, usually with me in the passenger seat, until the bank took the truck too. He hired lawyers, one after another until he'd spent thousands we didn't have with maxed-out credit cards. My mother fought to keep things afloat, and as a teenager, I comforted him after her angry outbursts. My arm around him as we lay on the bed, tears marking his face like furrows. I loved my parents, Melissa, but there was no way I could go back to that.

I didn't have to wonder what Marvin would have done.

He wouldn't have let them take the farm. He would have chained himself to the farmhouse chimney, the one my grandfather built sixty years ago by slapping the mortar in, brick by brick.

I pulled my hands away from my face.

Jump Ship had never hurt anyone. I knew that much from the media.

They were making a point, standing up for the powerless, working to redirect the whole society. Pushing forward, as Marvin had said. And what had I been doing at the diner? Dishing out bowl after bowl of soup, unsticking and re-adhering the bandage while beneath it the wound grew septic. I tried not to think about Phoenix, how fast she held to her beliefs and more: how she must have watched me leave, slamming that bowl aside, running away from the complex currents between us.

At the sink, I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were red-rimmed, as if I'd been crying. I pushed my scraggly bangs aside, smoothed them with spit. I was brave, I told myself. I could fight for my future. Like pioneer women in the old days, I pinched my pale cheeks. I was so young then. Young enough to think that I would be safe no matter what I did, that my choices somehow carried no weight, that what mattered most were my desires. That those two things had to be linked.

On the patio, I asked, “Why are we out here? It's freezing.”

The pitcher sat in the centre of the table like a lodestone. Margo poured me a glass.

“Can't smoke inside,” said Marvin. Walter spun an onion ring around on his metal pincer and Margo laughed. I reached for one and the greasy batter melted on my tongue. Marvin rested his arm along the back of my chair. It was like we were a couple, two couples, out on a fun double date.

On the way
home from the funeral, the wagon bumped over frost heaves and potholes. The pills rattled in Shannon's hand, cupped like a thing she'd harvested. In the back, where the bodies had been, I held the baby, handed to me like an apology by Mr. Bobiwash. The wagon had been washed out twice, but the smell of the corpses remained and I buried my nose in the infant's soft, sweaty neck. A hard thing jammed in my throat like those huge vitamins my mother made me take when I was little, to give me a long life.

Beside me, Thomson nudged the baby's leg with his fingers, his nails already turning a milky shade of blue. Marvin sat across from us, staring out at the rust-coloured fields and collapsed cedar fences, one arm stretched casually along the wagon box like we were out for a Sunday drive. I wanted to kick him, hurt him, for what he'd done. His green eyes drifted over as Thomson's voice emerged from beneath the scarf tied over his mouth. “What's her name?”

The three of us looked at Shannon and Mr. Bobiwash. Neither spoke.
The baby is just
the baby, I thought,
like you are just you
. But then, you are also Melissa. I've cared enough to give you that.

She lay in my arms, barely moving. I wondered if that was why Mr. Bobiwash hadn't named her himself, because she was hardly anything more than a little bit of nature. The muscles in his arms tensed as he twitched the reins, encouraging Caesar forward. As he glanced at Shannon and gently reached over to tug the gap in her shirt closed, I thought about what he'd lost. Mona and Abby. How she told him they would come back but never did. I suppose he waited as long as he could before finding a wife to help him care for his farm, his three boys. Did he regret that? Did he wish he'd left with Mona, packed up his family, and started over? When Shannon first came I tried to be friends with her, but she was hard, had let the difficulties of life act on her like a resin. Solidified, she stood to face them, as Phoenix had done, although eventually in Phoenix I'd found the soft pitch, that pliable wax.

Thomson's weight pressed into my shoulder, pinning my arm so it had started to tingle. I pushed at him and when he shifted, I felt the sudden space but then the baby began wriggling, her arms lifted like she was wrestling with an invisible snake and the wet heat of her urine soaked through to my arm. She started crying. Shannon didn't react. Her head bobbed with the rocking wagon. Drool glistened at the corner of her mouth. I wondered if she'd already taken some of the pills. I jostled the baby, hushed her. Marvin watched and I imagined his thoughts.
See? You can't even handle her.
The tiny hand lifted and grabbed at the swing of my heart locket.

Thomson squeezed the baby's flushed toes. “What about Phoenix?” he asked, his eyes sliding from Marvin, over the back of Mr. Bobiwash's head, to me. “As a name,” he clarified, his voice tight, and then he started again to cough.

At our driveway, Marvin helped him scramble to the wagon's edge and then half lifted him to the ground. I gave the baby back to Mr. Bobiwash, whose face was a storm of tension, lips tight, his eyes not meeting mine. This was the man who had saved our lives without asking any questions, had shared whatever he had with us until Shannon showed up. I waited for him to act, to take back the pills from Shannon, to do what was right. But she slipped the bright bottle into her jacket pocket and that final rattle shook us loose. I stepped back. Mr Bobiwash snapped the reins with one hand and they quickly drove away: the clomping hooves, the creak of the wooden wheels, the baby's sudden scream, swallowed by the day.

Along
the laneway, the forest pushes in—maple and oak saplings spreading onto the dirt drive, raspberry canes I'd picked clean a few days earlier. Thomson's coughing eased and Marvin and I helped him walk, each supporting an elbow, until he shook us off, his thin arms lifting like a fledgling bird. But he was weak and slumped forward, palms wrapped around the rocks of his knees. Marvin and I waited, ready to catch him if he fell. “I don't want any damn pity,” he said. “This is how things are.” When he straightened, his eyes were on mine.

“But they don't have to be.” Thomson smiled. His laugh lines appeared first and then the dark stains on his teeth when he pulled the scarf down.

“Sandy . . .” I couldn't wait any longer. My finger jabbed toward Marvin.

“He condemned you.”

“Don't be stupid. Those pills might keep that baby alive.”

It was true what he said, but I was angry. I looked at them: Marvin standing behind Thomson's shoulder as if they were a team. I wanted to remind him of what Marvin had done, the path of destruction that had sucked us all in.
He also condemned me
, I could have said, but I didn't. Instead, I asked, “So you want to die?”

It was an accusation but Thomson didn't answer. Around us, the forest shifted and snapped and I thought again of Phoenix's last moments, how we'd told Thomson, how he'd held on to her body like he was trying to catch up to her.