This Is the Night (11 page)

The final letter came. Lance called his friends. Every one of them showed up but Tim, the downstairs neighbor. Though Tim lived with Rebecca one floor below, rumor had it that Rebecca was running around Southwest Sector somewhere on a back-to-the-land Homeland Indigenous kick. Lance didn’t know what that meant, and he didn’t ask. Lorrie could have explained it to him, but of course she wasn’t around to do so.

Right now he needed food for his guests. Lance stood in front of his pantry, eyes sweeping for possibilities. Two old crackers. A half-eaten jar of pretzels. An empty plastic bag gusted from the shelf and cascaded to his feet, giving Lance the distinct feeling that he was standing at the entrance of a deep and hollow cave.

“Lorrie’s gone,” Lance told his small gathering. “And I’m up. Just got my greetings. First Tuesdays are the worst Tuesdays and all that.” He waved the paper in the air. “I’ve got a date and everything.”

“Man,” said Mike.

“Damn,” said Rick.

“I hate First Tuesdays,” said Wilson.

“Actually,” Norman said, reading the letter, “you haven’t been called in on a First Tuesday.”

“Is that a good thing?” said Mike.

“Maybe,” said Rick.

“I had a friend who was inducted on a Sunday,” said Wilson.

“Either way,” Lance said, “I didn’t ask you here to tell you that news. Because all of you are people I can trust, I also wanted to let you know that I won’t be going.”

“On what grounds?” asked Mike.

“I’m just not going to go.”

Silence. And then:

“Lawyer up,” said Mike.

“Lawyer up,” said Rick.

“You better lawyer up,” said Wilson.

“They’re everywhere now, you know,” said Rick.

“Who is?” said Lance. “Lawyers?”

“Undercovers. Reggies. Agents for the Registry.”

“No grounds?” asked Mike. “Pretty sure?”

“I believe some other factors might be in play here,” said Norman.

Once they saw Lance was serious, the tips and tricks started coming.

“Don’t shower for a week before induction.”

“Yeah! Stink like crazy.”

“I don’t know,” said Wilson. “I hear the Registry is on to that.”

Into the night, the advice continued, his friends whispering golden information into his ears of amiable Registry boards in blurry rural outposts, diploma-mill seminaries and their inviolable deferrals granted for study of the Young Savior and his teachings. Lance could see that they thought they were saving him, that they saw every new detail as a glowing springboard to leap from, each landing pool a thousand universes of possibility: strange societies of baldheads that helped out runners, where to get fake papers, and what kind of jobs took them and didn’t seem to mind. Lance copied it all down in a tiny notebook with tight springs on the binding, but after a while, he just scribbled small loops while they talked.

“You guys aren’t getting it.”

“What do you mean?” they asked.

“Everything you’re saying, these ideas, they’re all a dodge. I’m not going to run. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then what are you talking about?” said Wilson.

“Lorrie’s been kidnapped.”

Silence from his friends, like a clamp being tightened on their throats. Norman giggled, Wilson had a coughing fit, and Rick and Mike stared at each other’s toes. Lance attributed this mélange of inappropriate responses to the Substance Q cigarette they had shared just before he had made his announcement.

“Too many crap movies, Lance,” Norman said. His head was low, his chin locked into his chest. “This is real life, man. Take a listen to yourself.”

“I have,” Lance told them. “All my thoughts have been put into this. This is not some off-the-head idea. This is a powerful storm of outcomes. This is what I need to do.”

“But, um, Lance?” Rick, eyeing the others, clearly deciding to speak for them as well. “Think clearly, man. Lorrie wasn’t kidnapped. She left you.”

8.

“Time’s up,” a voice says.

Just like that, Alan is released back to the other boys. Punishment over. Returning to his dormitory, his eyes feel sore, unused to the many shapes and colors around him. Though he has only been gone for two days, it feels as though he has been in the cell for a lifetime.

Back in the dorm, the other boys crowd around and welcome him back. Everyone is sympathetic to the experience of two nights in solitary. Even the halfies.

The School has always been intent on pitting them against each other. Halfies versus pures. Everyone understands the two groups don’t mix. Some of those halfies don’t look like Homeland Indigenous at all. With all the Majority Group blood illuminating their features, a few of the half-breeds might as well be illegitimate sons of the nuns and priests. The halfies, they know, get bigger portions, softer sheets, and tufted pillows that their Majority mothers send them in large, glorious care packages. Homeland Indigenous mothers send pillows too, but the priests and nuns swipe them for themselves, they’re sure of it. His fellow pure boys are the ones who show Alan which Dumpsters are worth rummaging through for dented tuna cans and aged milk in the after hours before bed. Only halfies make prefect. Officer training classes—the makeup selected by aptitude and merit, the boys are told—consist only of halfies. There’s not a full-blooded Homeland Indigenous among them. And no one needs to be told of the impossibility of finding an officer on the front lines.

Four years ago, almost by accident, Alan had flipped a half-breed, brought one of them over to his side. “Roll with a halfie?” his friends had asked. Finally, after some exasperated explanations, Alan had punched one of the louder complainers in the jaw. No one had complained about a halfie in the crew since.

Still, there are times when Alan resents Gad. Whenever Alan goes to bed hollow and hungry while the halfie in the bunk below burps and gurgles into a floating sleep, he thinks about the world that despises him. These types of memories don’t fade with sunrise. Each morning, as the exclamations of his stomach jolt his eyes open, Alan remembers all over again: some people are just born with fewer burdens.

But there’s no denying his best friend is a halfie. Though perhaps “friend” isn’t the right word. Gad listens to him, beholds his presence, but Gad, Alan had found, is not your average halfie. Almost anyone would mistake him for being Majority Group. When the two of them first met, Alan didn’t understand what Gad was doing there at all. Sure, Gad had told everyone, his father was Group F, but his language skills are cracked and chippy; when speaking F, he can sound alternately like a stately young lord or a trapped prisoner whose tongue has been jabbed with the sharp tines of a thick fork. The differences don’t stop there. The nuns smile at him too much—even the gassy Sister Ava Azor—praising Gad for every right answer and assigning him smooth, desirable jobs while Alan gets pinned with carpentry or sweeping the colored dust that slides across the walls of the physical plant.

“Oh, but I wish I was a pure,” Gad tells him.

Of course he wishes he were full-blooded. Such a thought is exactly what Alan wants him to think. And yet their roles are as firm as a photograph.

Though Gad often tells Alan he won’t stand for special treatment, that it makes his heart blur around his chest and pump strange, tangled rhythms until he needs to puke, Alan knows that importance lies not in what happens to a person, but how that person reacts when a certain something occurs. Gad, of course, has always failed this test.

So for work assignments, while Gad chops onions or washes potatoes, it is Alan’s eyes that burn and his stomach that rages. The large stacks of the physical plant tower burp out clotted streams of thick and grinding smoke that smells sweet but feels hot and oily. The job is to crawl up the ladder deep within the stack and scrub the steaming yellow slime that coats the walls, each boy doing his best to make that thick coat thinner. Like the other physical plant boys, Alan rubs cough medicine in the space under his nostrils, a trick that allows the medicated vapors to drown out the anguishing smell of the purple dust that forms in the little cracks of the massive concrete tower. The method works: their sparse lunches remain in their stomachs.

The mountainous difference in their status is clear. Even so, Alan has made sure to balance the scales.

“Tomorrow in class,” he tells Gad, “you should make a joke on one of the Sisters.”

“Me?” squeaks Gad. “But the detergent! I’ll get in trouble.”

“I can’t do it. I just spent two days in solitary.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do Sister Ava Azor. You think she would ever pour detergent down a halfie’s throat?”

Gad shrugs.

“Of course she wouldn’t,” Alan tells him.

“I don’t know.”

“You need to do this,” Alan tells him. “Don’t let me down.”

“One thing to always remember,” Sister Ava Azor tells the class the next morning, “is that all of you have a connection, a bond with nature that I am unable to even comprehend. Your ancestors were primitive, yes, but they understood the land. They understood their surroundings. Though this has its downsides, I imagine it to be quite nice.”

Alan turns to look at Gad.
Now
, he wills his eyes to say.
Do it now.
Gad raises his hand.

“Yes?”

“Sister Ava Azor, I understand nature perfectly,” Gad says.

Alan can hear the shake in his voice.

“Oh?”

Gad pulls his shoulders back and steadies his hands. “I think it calls to me extra loud after a big plate of beans.”

Sister Ava Azor straightens.

Alan fixes a shapeless glare in Gad’s direction.
Finish the job.

The afternoon sun blares through the window. Gad looks at Alan. Alan nods. Speaking in Group F, his tongue pronouncing the words as Alan has taught him, Gad releases the predetermined fart joke into the world. Though it isn’t that funny, Alan has made sure that it contains the one thing the Sister will understand. Her name.

As instructed by Alan, every boy who speaks F erupts in wolflike laughter. Some laugh so hard their eyes fill with tears. If only not to be left out, other boys in the class—boys who do not speak one word of F but want to be part of the fun—join in.

Perfect
, Alan thinks. He is referring to both the distinct relish of a plan well executed and the ecstatic shiver that only can come from having a group of people do just what you tell them. He is not sure which one feels better.

Back in the front of the classroom, Sister Ava Azor, already sensitive to her own flatulence, assumes (rightly) that the words Gad has wrapped around her name—the one sound in his sentence she understands—have formed to make a joke about her gassiness. In a series of rapid movements she leaps from her perch in the front of the classroom, runs through the aisles of desks, and stops short in front of Alan.

“Detergent!” she screams. “After class.”

“Why me?” Alan says. “I didn’t say anything!”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” Sister Ava shrieks. “He doesn’t speak F well enough to make jokes. If you don’t watch out, I’ll send you right back to solitary.”

The braver kids snicker. Gad studies his palms. No punishment comes to him. Reality explained.

Is Gad’s heart blurring around his chest at the unfairness of it all, Alan wonders. Maybe both of them will end the day vomiting. Alan might get the detergent. But, he vows, someone else will pay.

A silent slide from his bed to the floor, and Alan walks softly down the corridor until he spots Gad’s toes. It’s two hours before Rousing, and low snores come from all angles. As Alan does his best to move soundlessly, the shy and distrustful Hazel, dorm mascot, places her forelimbs on the front of her cage, rustling the hardwood shavings that compose the boundaries of her life. Stopping for a moment, Alan peers through the small wire frame and shakes his head at her. Hazel’s tiny wheekings won’t wake anybody.

All the clocks are blinking; the power must have gone off some time in the night. The floor is cold against the bottoms of his feet, but Alan can’t yet put on shoes. He comes to the base of Gad’s bed, reaches under his sheet, and gives his big toe a soft wiggle. This is their sign.

Gad groans but gets up. A few boys in the dorm crack an eye at them, but Gad and Alan are now in their final year of school, and if their sunrise infraction even registers, these younger boys know better than to squeal. Even so, a part of Alan wishes someone would. Alan has silenced squealers before. As he moves past the sleeping underclassmen, he sees nothing but the passive slumber of defeat. These boys, too, are dreaming of the war being over by the time they graduate.

“C’mon!” He gives Gad a sharp elbow to the rib as they begin their silent departure.

Once outside, Alan and Gad slip on their shoes. The bushes glow blue in the early morning light. Quick movements are important, so they hurry toward the woods, past the burnt brick of the inner courtyard, around the storage shed piled high with the tightly sealed upright steel barrels of gasoline the janitors pour into the generator when the school goes dark, through the dry turtle pond, away from the airless school, and toward the mouth of the unruly forest.

They are always hungry, and now is no different. The real trees, the thick ones with fanned branches and heavy leaves, are a long way from the school, but there are hours until breakfast. Gad knows how to find the nests, and Alan is a better climber. Once off school grounds, they start to talk. They are still a ways from the forest; none of the shrubs come past their kneecaps.

“Walk faster,” Alan tells him. All sorts of nonsense could slow Gad down: the cast of sunlight on a shiny rock, some strange colored spot on the desert floor. Sometimes Gad is like an unruly horse, but just a quick wave of the whip is all it takes to get him back on track.

“I was dreaming when you woke me,” Gad says. “All I remember is that it was really messed up. A fire, everyone running, screaming, I can’t remember. I don’t like to have dreams like that.”

Alan sighs. What could be more boring than the recounting of someone else’s dreams? The trail begins to fade, and they find themselves in a yellow meadow of dry grassland. “Maybe your dream was about next year,” he says.

“What about next year?” Gad asks.

“Exactly,” Alan says. The idea that he could kill a man feels fine to him. The fact that he might have to does not.

One of them steps on a twig. The crack gives a hard echo that spirals up into the fizzy sky. Two lizards chase each other over the smooth surface of a rock. Gad stops under a ponderosa pine. “Right there,” he points.

Looking up, Alan nods. He’s hungry, and he knows that the answer to his hunger is in this tree.

“Right there, on the third branch,” Gad says, gesturing with his finger.

When exactly they figured out that crow eggs tasted as good as the normal kind from a chicken, Alan can’t remember. In fact, crow eggs are even better, as lately, the eggs served in the dining hall are barely thawed and light green with syrupy yolk and tiny cracks twisting and snaking along the surface of the shell. As for the crow eggs, Gad and Alan sneak out early to find them and then steal to the kitchen late at night to scramble and salt the extra sustenance.

Alan follows Gad’s finger and spots the nest. From the ground, the nest is just a clump of sticks resting in a fork of branches, though Alan knows once he’s up top, that same haphazard bunch of sticks will reveal itself to be a grass-lined, deliberate structure. His stomach turns.
I want those eggs, and I hate how much I want them,
he thinks.

Even though he should have outgrown them, Alan still reads the Ricky X-P books when no one is watching. Ricky X-P has a guy in his ragtag gang of friends who challenges him for the top spot—a difficult situation for sure—but at least he can always pile a small mountain of butter atop each thick slice of freshly baked bread while he considers his next move. Ricky X-P does not have to eat anything he doesn’t want to. The distance of art from life is never fair.

The nest is almost at the top of the tree. Gad picks up a rock and makes a pile of several more in case the mother crow is around. Both the mother and father bird can attack, but it’s best, they’ve found, to take the mother out first. Once the mother has been killed, the father bird lets out a few dejected caws and gives up. Some father, they joke.