The Unit (20 page)

Oh
no
.

I fly us back through and out of the smoke. I leave downtown Sac behind us because downtown is death, and death is still hot and hungry. I fly toward our neighborhood because I want to see if anything is left of the house I used to call home.

Her old man might make it, and he might not. I take Melanie out of service so she can help her pops. My men bitch like crazy when I do it, but I put a guard on the shack, and I check the place myself every few hours, and so far my pirates are keeping their swords in their scabbards.

I’m not sure why I’m being so nice to the girl, but it’s something I need to do, no matter why. I watch her helping her old man, and it does something to me, because I can’t imagine anyone doing that for me, staying up all hours and holding me and changing my bandages and crying and worrying. It makes me jealous, but I’m also hoping that someone will care that much about me, someday, and right now it doesn’t seem completely impossible.

And of course maybe her old man really
is
rich as God. And if it’s true, maybe I’ll find a way to get the fuck out of here in one piece, with Melanie and the gold we found and hopes of even better things.

Dear God, why did I let myself believe that our city might still be okay? And now I’m not sure of anything. Home was the prize—the point of all of the walking and risking and praying and fighting and flying. But I knew it was a possibility that the city was ruined, so there was nothing left to do but see it for ourselves.

At first I don’t believe it, but I’m a believer these days, so I try to look down at the hole like an anthropologist, a surveyor, an engineer, an insurance adjuster. I’m a FEMA official looking for survivors, then I’m a funeral director with pre-cremated clients, then I’m me again, the claws of anger beginning to pierce the shock.

I ride out a long wail that scares the bejesus out of me. Even while I’m screaming, I know it doesn’t help anything, but I scream like a raging baby, expelling all the air from my lungs, winding down and then taking a deep breath and doing it again. My face is hard and hot and I can feel my veins and arteries worming their way to the surface of my skin, but I can’t stop myself. Scott and the old man turn to look and then they turn back. They hold their heads very still and let me wail.

And then it passes, and I can breathe in and out. My wounded arm is throbbing to the beat of the airplane’s engine. Scott skirts the bomb crater and flies toward the eastern suburbs. He leaves the hole where the Capitol once stood, and heads for our neighborhood, our home. It’s the worst nightmare of
Fail-Safe
and
On the Beach
and duck-and-cover and the documentaries about nuclear war. Red circle in the center. Bright orange ring for the unsurvivable blast. Dark yellow rings for the zones of fire and lethal radiation, and so on, out to a radius of dozens of miles.

When I was a little girl I used to sit on the warm wooden floor of my childhood home and draw red and orange and yellow rings over my coloring book pictures, not understanding what they represented, but loving the symmetry, the rings circling my home and saying,
This is where you live; if you get lost, this is the way home
.

We fly out of the smoke, and I recognize the buildings below. The Methodist church, the elementary school, the Wal-Mart. Scott circles our neighborhood. Our house would probably be in one of the medium-dark yellow rings. There wasn’t any fire here, or fallout, but it’s too close to the blast zone, and I know we won’t be able to go back. Not ever. My garden, with my plans for tomatoes and bell peppers and lettuce and sunflowers. My kitchen with its new granite countertops. The oven that cooked all those meals. The potholders that Melanie made in the third grade. The baby footprints and pictures and the documents we thought were important enough to store in a fireproof safe. All the memories now poisoned unto death.

Scott turns us away and climbs higher. The radiation must be passing into our bodies now. I don’t feel anything but I can’t slow my breathing and I start to hyperventilate. Dizzy at low altitude, and it doesn’t help to look out and see the road crowded with cars and trucks that will never run again. I begin to see bodies, their feet facing the blast. My head hurts. My uterus hurts. I get tunnel vision. But I’m sick of thinking like a victim. Like prey. We’ve been at the mercy of others for far too long, and I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want peace; I want justice. I’m dizzy and then I’m not myself at all. The pain fades into the background and I break through the clouds in my head and fly fast and straight in the sunlight. I’m hard and without emotion, and I feel free to do anything I want to do. Why should only ambushers and rapists and killers be allowed to indulge themselves? It’s my turn now.

I cock Old Bill’s old gun. It makes four clicks when I pull back the hammer. I grind the barrel into the place where his spine meets his brain. I feel nothing at all for him, and I almost forget that my son is close enough to touch. It was people like Bill who did this to us. Bill didn’t bomb our city, but his kind did. His foreign counterparts in crime and sleaziness and greed, and the mean and fearful masses egging them on. He might be at the bottom rung of people who do things like that, but he’s one of them, no doubt about it, and one of them needs to pay. It might as well be him.

He reads my mind.

“Wasn’t me that done this.”

He turns and I pull the gun from his spine and let it wander up to his brainpan. He turns his head until the muzzle is pointed at the corner of his forehead.

“I didn’t have nothing against Sacramento. I thought it was a fine old town. It had all kinds of hookers, you know. Tall ones and short ones and whores of all colors and persuasions and talents.”

He laughs his phlegmy, horny old-man laugh. “And speaking of
fucking
, hey, look on the bright side—the state of California won’t be taxing us up the ass anymore. Not for a while, anyhow.”

He’s enjoying himself. I finally catch my breath. He offends me. If thy eye offends thee, pluck it out. My finger is moving from the triggerguard to the trigger. My finger is on the trigger and I’m down in the charcoaled city center. I’ve been cremated and the wind is mixing my molecules into the great mounds of ashes. I’m down there mixing with friends and acquaintances and strangers and children. All the children, their dust and dead promise blowing through the remains of the city.

The muzzle of the gun wanders away from Old Bill’s ear and then back and away again. We hit a patch of turbulence, or maybe the turbulence is only in my mind, and the gun bucks and roars in my hand. The air is blasted and bitter with the smell of spent gunpowder. We sit with our mouths open. Scott’s lips start to move but I can’t hear what he’s saying. Old Bill puts his hands to his ears and opens his mouth to scream but I can’t tell if he’s making any sound. He turns and his face is livid. He grabs the barrel of the gun. I pull the trigger, but I hadn’t cocked the gun again after it fired, and nothing happens. My fingers lose their strength and Old Bill has it then. I reach for it, but I only have one functional arm, and he bats my hand away. He cocks the revolver and points it at Scott’s head. He’s shouting, and his words dribble into my wounded ears. He’s calling me bad names and then I can hear again.

“I’ve had just about as much as I’m gonna take,” he says.

He points the gun at my face.

“Sit the fuck back.”

I do. He points the gun at Scott again.

“If you try anything, we’ll only have one pilot on this flight. Understand?”

I nod. Scott keeps us straight and level, obeying Old Bill’s command to fly us back to the north.

My Goggy is still alive, so things could be worse. But we’re in the hands of people who make it their business to make things worse. They let me give him water, but he’s not
with it
enough to swallow.

I get a cloth and clean the small part of my dad’s head that isn’t bandaged. Scalp wounds bleed like crazy. He starts bleeding again. It takes me half the morning to get his head wound to clot, while the boys sleep off their hangovers. The kid on guard duty watches without saying anything. He doesn’t tape up my hands and I don’t do anything that might make him want to.

The boys are mean bastards when they wake up. I make coffee for them and watch them moan and groan and glare at my dad, and it makes me happy to see their pain. I wish they were in a lot more pain, but then I wonder if that idea violates my vow of pacifism. No. I’m not a saint. And even saints and heroes must’ve had bad thoughts about their oppressors. Don’t you think Gandhi wanted to bring pain to his enemies? Maybe even Christ looked down from the cross at the laughing Roman soldiers and thought about how nice it would be to shoot some fire and brimstone up their asses. It’s only human.

Bill Junior soaks his head in cold water and then walks over to us. He walks with his feet turned in and his head down, like he’s walking across the stage of a Western movie set.

“Will he live?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s my dad. He’s tough and he’s going to live. Get used to the idea, because that’s just the way it is.”

“Good.”

He walks away and organizes a burial party for the two boys Dad killed. I try not to look at them. I don’t care that they’re dead. Not a bit, even though I was partially responsible for their deaths. If I hadn’t let myself get kidnapped… If I would’ve fought harder or run faster or hidden myself better—if, if, if—then those boys might still be walking the earth and joking and grabbing their crotches and standing in line to pull a train on someone.

Yeah. After a few minutes of wallowing in that thought, I can look at them. The living ones don’t bother to cover the bodies of the dead. They leave them staring up into the overcast, their eyes glazed with the stupidity of death. The living boys pile a stack of lumber into a shoddy funeral pyre, then they strip the bodies. They save some of the clothes and they fold them carefully, and then they toss the corpses onto the pyre.

One of the dead ones was called “Rick the Prick” because he had such a big one. The first time he raped me, I bled for a long time. The other kid was Ralph, just Ralph. He had a weak chin and he liked to hit me. They look too small to have been as dangerous as they were. They look pathetic, but I can’t stop watching them burn.

Bill Junior doesn’t say any words over them. The fire is low and smoky and he throws a cup of gasoline on it and walks away. The fire blossoms into the sky and seems to hover above the bodies, then it gets right down into the evidence of their existence. I don’t feel good about how they died, my responsibility for it, but I watch the fire feed on them until they look just exactly
right
.

I look at the gauges. There’s a big hole in the instrument panel. I hear a steady tone in my ears, but it’s getting quiet enough that I can hear other things, too.

“Fuel’s getting low.”

My voice sounds like it came from down a hole. BS shakes his head.

“Just keep us headed north, boy.”

“Why are you going back?”

“I think I might’ve left the oven on.”

He smiles but his eyes are as black as the hole in the muzzle of his revolver. He looks back at Mom and tells her not to touch the other guns. Mom moans. I should be pissed off at her, but I’m not. I feel bad for her. I wish she would’ve shot BS in the head. I wish I had pieces of his skull and brain in my hair and the windows were splattered with the last of his sicko thoughts. I think I’d be happy then.

He keeps the gun to my head. I start to panic but I squeeze the control yoke until my fingers burn. I’m flying VFR at 130 knots and I have to
maintain
. Mom cries for a while.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Everything is okay.”

BS says, “That’s the spirit, boy.”

I turn to look at Mom. I’ve never seen her so pale. Even back when I was a kid, after the surgery she had on her knee, she had more color than she does now. Pale, wan, ashen, drawn, waxen. I want to pull her out of the hole she’s fallen into, but I don’t know how.

She cries and wails again. Her voice rises like an old air raid siren. It keeps going up and up and it reaches a peak and I can’t get the sight of nuked Sacramento out of my head. The panic builds inside me again, still. The yoke is a bloody bone in my hands, and I can’t feel my feet on the rudder pedals. My heartbeat gets out of synch and I’m dizzy in that sick way that feels like dying. Her voice reaches the end of its breath and she’s quiet. She has no air in her lungs, but she doesn’t take another breath, and that’s even worse than the wailing. My vision starts to tunnel and gray, and I have to slap myself hard across the face. I slap and slap until the panic is replaced with pain.

BS tells me to get my shit together. Mom pulls out of it. She takes a breath. She grabs my shoulder and tells me no. No, no, no. She apologizes and asks for forgiveness and protection for us from her imaginary god, the one we’ve all been praying to, and then we’re finally quiet. I turn off the heat because it picked up the smell of the dead city, but it gets cold fast in the mountains, and I have to turn it back on. I try to get comfortable by not paying any attention to anything that’s not directly in front of my nose. The little engine spins its two-bladed prop and we climb into the Sierras.