The Free (P.S.) (15 page)

“You went back to the guys?”

“Yes,” she said.

19

With her shift over, Pauline sat in her car in the hospital parking lot and waited for the defroster to warm the windshield. As she waited she called a twenty-four-hour diner and ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and a strawberry milkshake to go.

At home she sat on the couch and ate and watched TV. When she woke the next morning her throat was sore and her head was congested. She was getting sick. She looked through the grocery store ads and found two specials. She dressed and drove to Safeway. She put twenty-four cans of vegetable soup, an eighteen-pack of frozen burritos, five Hershey bars, and a bottle of daytime cold medicine in her cart and pushed it toward checkout. There were two clerks working. She saw Leroy’s mother behind one of the registers, and went to it.

“I don’t know if you’ll recognize me,” she said as she set her items down on the belt. “But I’m Pauline, one of Leroy’s nurses. And you’re Darla?”

She smiled. “Of course I recognize you.”

“It’s always strange seeing a person out of context.”

“It is,” Darla said and began checking the cans.

“You must think I’m crazy. Your son’s nurse buying a case of vegetable soup, a family pack of frozen burritos, Hershey bars, and some cold medicine.”

“Don’t worry. I never pay attention to what people buy anymore,” she replied.

“The cold medicine is for me but the rest is for my dad. He only eats chicken noodle soup and frozen burritos. I’m trying to get him on salad but it’s hard going. So now I’m thinking vegetable soup. Maybe he’ll eat vegetables that way. Anyway, I’m coming with candy bars.”

“A bribe?”

Pauline nodded.

“Are you working tonight?”

“I’m supposed to but I woke up with a cold. I’ll try and get some sleep this morning. If I feel better I will. You get there around seven, right?”

She nodded.

Pauline took the coupons from her purse and said, “What are you reading to him now?”

“
The Caladriken Caves
,” she said and laughed.

“What’s this one about?”

Darla looked behind Pauline to see no customers coming. “This one’s pretty good. It’s set on a planet like Earth but it’s not Earth. There’s two tribes who live there. One has all men. Their tribe kills women and girls and steals their male children. They think women control the weather and that they intentionally ruin it. It’s always storming there. Blizzards and floods and heat waves. There’s volcanoes everywhere and hurricanes and tornados and earthquakes. The all-man tribe is crazy and really violent. The other tribe has men and women and kids. They’re normal but they have to go underground and live in a series of caves to hide from the other tribe. They only come out once in a while to scavenge food, and they’re always getting killed when they do. Their children, some of them, have never seen daylight. But the male tribe won’t go into the caves because they think they’re haunted.”

“Are they haunted?”

“Yeah,” Darla said and finished checking the groceries. “There are these huge worm bats that attack all the time. They come out of the dirt like a worm but they can fly and they have fangs.” She laughed and put lotion on her hands from a bottle that sat next to the register. “Between you and me I can’t put it down. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. The main guy from the good tribe is named Luc, and he’s really something.”

“It sounds like a good one,” Pauline said. She took out her purse and paid for the groceries. “If I’m feeling better I’ll see you tonight, and if not I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I hope you get some rest.”

“Me too,” said Pauline and she left. After her, an arguing couple with three kids came pushing two full carts of food to Darla’s register. They began stacking groceries on the belt and behind them a line slowly grew.

At 11:30 Darla received an emergency message to call the hospital. Leroy’s doctor informed her that Leroy had been given a tracheostomy and moved to intensive care. He’d come down with pneumonia. When she hung up the phone she walked into her manager’s office and asked for the rest of her vacation days, and put on her coat and left. She drove home and broke down crying at the kitchen table.

As she sat alone in her house she knew she had to make the call to Jeanette. A call she could no longer put off. She sat for a long time with the phone in her hand in a state of panic, and then slowly dialed Jeanette’s work number and told her the news. She changed out of her work clothes and got in her car and drove to the hospital. On the third floor, in intensive care, a nurse led her to him. She could tell from the first moment she saw her son that afternoon that he was going to die. She went to him and kissed his forehead, each cheek and his chin, and sat down. She took the novel from her purse, put on her reading glasses, and read to him until her eyes grew weary.

At a marina in Bella Bella, British Columbia, they stopped with less than a quarter-tank of gas and rented a slip for seven days and with that they were flat broke. Each morning they walked through the small island town looking for jobs, and eventually Jeanette found work as a maid in a motel, and Leroy got on a construction crew building a vacation home on a nearby island.

They never went to the local restaurant or the local bar. They didn’t socialize in any way. At night they would go to bed early and Jeanette would read to him from a stack of novels they’d collected from a paperback exchange. Months passed and winter set in and the sky never cleared. It grew darker until it was always either dawn, dusk, or night, and day disappeared completely.

One evening Leroy sat back in the cabin booth. He had just gotten off work. They had the radio playing and he drank Rainier beer and nursed a pint of whiskey that sat on the galley table while Jeanette made stew on the small propane stove.

“Last night,” he said, “I woke up and I could hardly breathe. As I lay in the dark all I could think about was my mom. About how hard she worked for my uncle and me. I know I never talk about her, but that’s not ’cause I don’t love her. I think it’s just ’cause my whole life she’s always been so solid and steady. There are so many other things in the world that are troubling or failing. The truth is I always think of those things, and not the things that keep me from failing. I know that’s selfish and wrong, but it seems like that’s the way I am. When I think of her I . . . I just feel easy. It’s like she’s my liver or arm or leg or heart. She’s a part of me. When I finally shut my eyes I felt peace and it was easier to breathe. But then I woke an hour later and I’d had a nightmare about my uncle.”

“Not much of a break, huh?”

“No,” Leroy said. “I guess not.”

“What happened in your nightmare?”

“My uncle went to the VA hospital one morning and told the staff there he was disappearing in depression. He was distraught. They sent him home with medication, antidepressants. I’m not sure why it was right then that he fell apart. Maybe people just get worn out. I never thought that was true, but now I think it is true. Maybe people can only take so much. Anyway, they gave him the pills and he came back to the trailer. He was there for a while longer. Then one day I came home from school and he’d written separate notes to my mom and me and left them on the kitchen table. And that was it.”

“What happened?”

“I just remember in my nightmare I saw him and it was awful and full of blood. He was alone in his trailer and he wasn’t breathing. He wasn’t my uncle anymore.”

A ship arrived from Seattle, Washington. There were eleven men aboard and they docked at Bella Bella with engine problems. They had to fly in parts and a mechanic from Vancouver to repair it. They were stuck there for weeks. A few of the men rented rooms at the local motel. Jeanette had heard through her boss that they were tracking down thousands of Green Loaders who were living illegally in Canada. The men on the boat were a part of a vigilante group called The Free, a collective who caught and killed people with the mark. There was a rumor that while they were there awaiting repairs, they’d found and killed two middle-aged women who were living alone in the forest. There was another rumor that they had gone thirty miles inland and found two couples hiding in tents near a lake and killed them and their dogs.

One morning Jeanette pushed her cleaning cart in front of a room and stopped. She knocked three times on the door and yelled, “Housekeeping!” When no one answered she unlocked the door and went inside to find one of the men from The Free ship lying on top of his bed, naked. She turned around and headed for the door, but as she did he told her he had been watching her for days. He told her he knew she had the mark, and that he just couldn’t make up his mind if he was going to let her go or kill her.

She got out of the room and pushed her cart to the laundry where she locked herself inside and tried to think. She began crying. Leroy was at work for five more hours, and she wasn’t even sure what island he was working on. Her boss wasn’t there and if he were, what would she say? She was illegal and she had the mark. She’d be fired, and then what? She stayed in there for twenty minutes and, not knowing what else to do, she went back to work. She pushed her cart to the next room and knocked three times. She again called out “Housekeeping!” and went inside. But as she changed the sheets in the empty room the man from The Free came in dressed in muddy hiking boots and a camouflage uniform. He sat in a chair in the corner and stared at her.

“I know why you’re up here,” he said. “And I know who you are and where you’re from.”

“You’re not supposed to be in here,” she said. “It’s against the rules.”

“I’m spending more money in this dump than they know what to do with. They don’t care.”

“Will you leave the room, please?”

“It’s people like you who are ruining the country.”

“But I’m not even in the country.”

“You’ll come back,” he said.

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

“Why are you here?” she cried.

“It’s easier to find you. You stick out. Anyway, somebody’s got to do it. You’ll be back sooner or later and we don’t need that. You’ll be crawling under some fence or hiding in the back of some truck. What you don’t understand is that at one time we had the greatest country in the world. The greatest country that had ever existed. Now it ain’t shit and it’s people like you who’ve ruined it. People who don’t stand up for the flag. Who don’t take their hat off when the anthem plays. Who won’t sacrifice. For years the politicians gave everything to people who were too fucked up to hold a job or too lazy to do anything but lay on their backs and pump out kids who end up in prison or on welfare. But your turn is over. The test solves it and it’ll save our country.”

“How does the test solve it?”

“It gets rid of the weak and lazy. It gets rid of people like you.”

“But you don’t even know me.”

“I know you,” he said.

“How can you say that?”

“ ’Cause you’re all the same.” He stood up and walked over to her until their faces nearly touched. She could smell his breath. There was dried toothpaste on the corners of his mouth. She didn’t run or push him away. She just sat down on the bed, defeated, and tears flowed from her eyes.

“See, you already gave up and I haven’t even done anything yet.”

She came back from work that evening so upset she could hardly speak. Once aboard she locked herself in the cabin and drew the curtains shut and waited. It was two hours before Leroy came down the galley steps. But when he did she just greeted him as she always had, and didn’t mention the man from The Free at all. Through dinner she struggled not to break down, and acted as cheerful and calm as she could. She read to him in bed as usual and he held her when he fell asleep. But the night passed slowly and she tossed and turned. She was wrecked with worry, and finally near dawn she woke Leroy and told him about the man and what had happened the day before.

They left Bella Bella that morning.

They headed farther into Canada, and hid inside the inlets of Princess Royal Island. Weeks passed until they came to the town of Kitimat and got a motel room for the night. The next morning they meandered through the shops of downtown, and in a sporting goods store they were drawn to a family shopping. The man and the woman both wore turtlenecks and the man wore gloves. They had two young children with them. Jeanette introduced herself to them and found out they were American. Recklessly she lifted her pant leg, showing them her marked leg. The man took off his right glove and showed her his marked hand.

In the back of the empty store the couple told them they had heard of a settlement a hundred miles inland. A settlement that the Canadian authorities left alone, where it was safe, where there was a school and a makeshift hospital. It was its own country inside of a country, they were told. The man wrote down the maps they’d need, and gave them the exact location of the settlement.

On the boat that evening, Leroy and Jeanette counted their money, and with less than four hundred dollars in savings, decided they would try to find it. The following morning they moved the boat to the bay and anchored. They took what they thought they would need and rowed the dinghy ashore. Jeanette went for supplies and Leroy looked for transportation. Three hours later he came back with a rusted-out red 1984 Ford Fiesta, which he’d hotwired and stolen from a hospital parking lot. They loaded it and left.

They drove a hundred and fifty miles on rough roads. They went farther into the wilderness, past clear cuts and dense forests, past rivers and lakes. As dusk approached they came to the mile marker they were looking for, and past it the logging road that led to the settlement. For ten miles they made their way on washed-out gravel until they came to a series of abandoned cars on the side of the road.