Want Not (27 page)

Micah was sixteen that spring, and unbearably restless. Only her mother’s wretched legacy was restraining her from hiking down to the highway and hitching a ride out into “the World,” as her father scorned everything beyond their property lines. Back during the war, “the World” was what they’d called civilization: that infantryman’s dreamscape of hot meals, soft bedding, dry clothes, English-speaking girls, mortar-free nights. For John Rye, however, it had become code for something different: a society in thrall to the idols of materialism, stripped of its old core values, its honor, its ancient natural balance. The World, he thought, was what God had ordered him to flee, and what had later stolen Janie from him (whether by force or seduction, it didn’t matter). When Micah, as a young girl, had asked him about the airplanes she saw coursing high above the mountains, John Rye had answered, “It’s people trying to escape the World.”

“What happens?” she said.

“Nothing,” came his reply. “They run outta fuel and have to come back down.”

Yet here was Leah, fresh from the World and embracing rather than fleeing its horrors. The way she talked reminded Micah of a shaken can of Coca-Cola (her second-favorite World attraction, behind Reese’s Pieces): frothy, bubbling, impossibly sweet. She displayed none of the sour lassitude of the Lusk women, who spent the bulk of their days and nights smoking generic menthols on the trailer steps, looking withered and put out, as if waiting on a locksmith on account of their bozo husbands’ drunk and absentminded ways. Leah had soft scarless hands with unchewed fingernails, and she smelled like the inside of a pumpkin blossom, half floral and half vegetal, an alluring mixture of winsomeness and nourishment. She’d been to Africa (“must be shitloads of niggers over
there,
” Wade cut in, to which even T.J. objected, slapping Wade upside the head and saying
Shut the fuck up
) and to Europe and to the Galápagos Islands, where, she said (rapidly, effusively), she’d talked her way aboard an Ecuadorian Navy boat to patrol for shark poachers. When she grabbed Micah’s hands, in a flurry of excitement about some sea lions with which she’d hobnobbed on the island of Floreana, Micah gasped with what felt like the strongest surge of pleasure she’d ever experienced. Almost immediately she recognized the sensation as love. This identification was not difficult to make; she’d never seen a sea lion before but felt sure she’d recognize one if it came waddling up to the cabin. When Leah offered to cut Micah’s hair—which hadn’t been cut since her mother’s disappearance, its tattered split ends hanging slackly past her waist—the Lusk boys finally gave up on her, conclusively slapping their knees then stomping outside to sulk. “At least she didn’t drink none of our beer,” Wade said to T.J., in limp condolence.

The next morning, John Rye awoke to the sight of Leah asleep on his floor, swaddled in a synthetic orange sleeping bag. Tusker was lying beside her, as if he’d dragged her inside the way he’d done with squirrels and rabbits as a leaner, faster dog. Micah was already up, piling squarely folded dresses into an Army Surplus rucksack.

“I’d do for some water, if you don’t mind,” John Rye said from his bed. The previous night’s combination of Leviticus and moonshine had left singemarks on his brain. Even his tongue felt charred. When Micah delivered it, he asked her, “Who’s that?”

“My new friend Leah,” she said, shifting back a few steps to make the subsequent announcement more formal and, she hoped, less contestable: “I’m gonna hike to Maine with her.”

John Rye took a long desperate swig of the water. “All right,” he said quietly, then repeated it. He pulled himself up and over to the edge of the bed and ran a comb of three fingers through his beard. “What’s in Maine?”

“The end of the trail.”

“I see.”

He raised his feet and stretched his toes, examining them with a scowl.

“And the whole world, Daddy,” she went on. “I’m sixteen. I can’t be living like this forever.”

Still inspecting his toes, he said calmly, “Like this, how?”

How? For a few moments she stammered—not wanting to hurt him, not wanting to desert him the way her mother had (maybe) deserted him, not wanting to accelerate the desolate downward spiral that her mother’s disappearance had set in motion—then argued around the edges: “With nobody but the Lusks to talk to! With nothing but the Bible to read. With nothing in my life but . . . seventy-seven acres, Daddy. You should
listen
to where Leah’s been. France, Africa, the Gapa . . . Gapagalo Islands . . .”

He just stared at her.

“They’re in South America,” she said.

“I know where they are.”

“Then how come I didn’t?”

He paused, cocking his head. “We got plenty other books besides the Bible . . .”

She snapped back, “You ain’t brought a new book home since Mama disappeared,” which brought a flinch to his face. As if by ricochet, an identical flinch quirked Micah’s face: She wasn’t cushioning her blows enough. “There’s something like six billion people in the world, Daddy. And I don’t know but, like, ten of ’em.”

“The Lusks, they’re good boys,” he protested. “You seen how they help us out.”

She could’ve batted down this point in a millisecond, by noting the varied degrees of help they’d given her in semen form. Instead she said, “I can’t understand what’s wrong with the World ’less I see it for myself, can I?”

The question—cleverly indisputable, Micah thought—hit him like a droplet of water on a hot skillet. “You been out there!” he exclaimed, with enough vocal force to make her shoulders jump. “What happened, back at that school? You recall that? And what about them people they stuck you with?”

“I ain’t saying I’m moving to Knoxville!”

To which he shouted back, “And I ain’t saying you can’t . . . go.”

The confused frown on her face belied the tandem surges of relief and joy she was feeling. She moved three steps toward her father, close enough to touch him. “Then what?”

For a long while John Rye re-examined his toes and said nothing.

“Oh, Daddy,” she finally said, tossing her arms around him and kissing his neck, which tasted of the turpentine he dashed himself with, cologne-style, to ward off tick bites. In later years, when she’d tell the story of her childhood, she’d resent the
pity
that inevitably followed it, and the disdain her listeners would often heap upon her father for “imprisoning” (Lola’s term) her and her mother in the mountains for all those years (“a classic caveman maneuver, cloaked in religion”: Lola). How could he have
done
that to you, they’d ask, interpreting Micah’s tenderness as some filial subset of Stockholm Syndrome, sometimes trying to fish suppressed rage out of her to induce a therapeutic reckoning. Yet there was no rage within her, or even mild disgruntlement. Any pity, she thought, should have been steered his way: for trying and failing to shield her. He’d tried to remake Eden, and she’d been the snake, or if not the snake the apple—the thing that’d opened a portal to the lesser world, that’d brought evil down upon them. “Then what?” she said.

“It’s just a bad world,” he said quietly.

They were both startled by Leah, drowsily countering from the floor, “It’s a
beautiful
world.”

Turning to Leah, Micah released her father, who cut his eyes toward Leah as well.

“Was,” John Rye said to her. “Once.” Nodding toward Micah, he said, “She’ll see.”

That was the last time she’d seen her father, though, care of the Lusks, they corresponded two or three times a year. Last she’d heard, the doctors had forced Motee to quit drinking, on account of his liver, and John Rye was attempting the same. He’d finally plumbed out the cabin, too, after devising a way to harness wind power into an old truck battery for running a well pump. Every one of his letters ended with the same ambiguous question: “Where in the world are you?”

Following their five-month walk to Maine she and Leah had flown to San Francisco—the flight so terrified Micah that Leah force-fed her some contraband hashish somewhere over Ontario, which did the wild opposite of calm her down; this was nearly cause for emergency medical care, and, coupled with her father’s moonshine dependency, quashed all further curiosity about chemical enhancements—where for six months they lived with Leah’s ex-sister-in-law in a cottage on Telegraph Hill. The ex-sister-in-law, Julie, also called Micah “Tarzan,” and smirked at Micah’s childishly rapt fascination with saltwater, sushi, mangoes, tampons, bookstores, transvestites, Rollerblades, the zoo, silk sheets, panhandlers, espresso, the cruise ships docked alongside the Embarcadero, and the high-end, keypad-controlled, Japanese toilet in Julie’s bathroom that glowed in the dark, cleaned and massaged one’s rear with a pressurized jet spray then dried it with blasts of hot air, and played any of six soundtracks including traditional Japanese harp music which Micah found magnificently and exotically soothing.

A flock of feral red parrots nested in a date palm in their backyard. Micah found that if she stood still long enough, with bits of apple on her outstretched palm, a few of the parrots would eat from her hand and even perch on her forearm. At first this was cause for ticklish fun—and for Julie to quip to Leah, as she peeked through the blinds, “I see your wild child is finally making friends”—but after a while, as the thrill and wonderment wore off and Micah found she could pet and even (she thought) communicate with the birds, she came to see the parrots as a prime rebuttal to her father’s indictment of the World. They were proof, she decided, that wildness
could
coexist with civilization, that a balance could be struck, that the World hadn’t been degraded beyond rescue. With a parrot roosting on her wrist, pecking apple from her palm, she would place her other hand over one eye and take a mental snapshot of the bird backed by a red spray of pyracantha and the wild blue haze of the Pacific in the distance; then she would transfer the hand to her other eye, to take in the opposing view: the houses piled atop one another on Telegraph Hill, the Bay Bridge, the Transamerica Pyramid, all the clamor and concrete abutting the water. And then the hand would flip back—to the parrot, the Pacific—and back again—to the skyscrapers, the iron fire escapes, the quilted city blocks—and Micah, radically in love and overwhelmed by the vast rich multitudinousness of this new World, would whisper to herself:
You were wrong, Daddy, just look how you were wrong.

Then came Dilly. Dilly lived next door; he was in his mid-fifties, wore a constant uniform of Hawaiian-print shirts and tassel loafers, and was equipped with a colostomy bag concealed beneath a decorative beaded pouch. Dilly didn’t like the parrots. They squawked. They dropped little greenish turds on his patio and its wrought-iron table. And, he claimed, they were an invasive species, like kudzu or mitten crabs, that was stealing precious food and resources from the beleaguered native birds. Parrot-feeders like Micah, he complained to Julie, were only aggravating the situation. Dilly was fulsomely emotional about it all, saying that while he didn’t wish to start a “conflict” with Julie (“as a neighbor I have nothing but love for you,” he said, afterwards spelling out
love
for bonus effect), the squawking was inciting migraines and, he said (patting the colostomy bag), he was “terribly worried” about the potential hazards of all those germ-laden “poos.” Julie apologized, hugged him, and promised an immediate stop to the feeding.

Micah was incensed. All through dinner that night she pleaded her case—at one point Julie groaned, “Is there
anything
else we can talk about?” to which Micah replied no and silent Leah slid farther into her chair—and then long, long into the night, until Julie finally told Leah, “If Tarzan says one more fucking word about those parrots, I want her gone. As in,
tomorrow.
”

“What does he mean, the squawking bothers him?” Micah kept on. “That’s like saying the ocean being blue bothers you. Or the leaves falling off the trees.”

“For fuck’s sake, welcome to reality!” Julie howled back. “Welcome to civilization, okay? It’s not a zoo. It’s
my
house! It’s
my
neighbor! Get over it! Find another fucking . . . hobby.” Then she threw up her arms, in Leah’s direction, and went clomping off to her room in thick exasperation. In the morning she told Leah it was time for them to go. Micah’s presence was warping her
chakra
something bad.

So they traveled to India for three months, Leah and Micah, though not before dumping two hundred pounds of birdseed in and around Dilly’s patio. Obtaining a passport for Micah proved a serious hurdle, requiring the aid of her father’s Knoxville attorney, Leah’s father’s attorney, and two forged documents. Micah’s passport photo, taken at Walgreens, was the first formal portrait of her life. For hours and hours she stared at it, rubbing it with her thumb as if to disprove its flat one-dimensionality, as if to make tactile contact with this piece of herself trapped beneath laminate. The blue passport itself was her solemn badge, signifying newfound allegiance to the World, and though it mesmerized her, with its official notice from the Secretary of State and inscrutable numeric coding, it also felt treasonous: a vinyl-bound repudiation of all that John Rye had tried to shield her from. On the long flight to Mumbai, dulled by regular doses of Xanax that Leah administered (“It’s nothing nothing
nothing
like the hash,” Leah promised), Micah wondered about the girl in the photo: Was she friend or foe? And of whom?

They roamed from hostel to hostel, watched their underwhites turn malevolently green in the cold waters of the Ganges at Haridwar, observed a ritual cremation pyre at the Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi, made slow giggly love in a pink poppy field outside Bundi with their lips dyed crimson from chewing
paan,
dispensed thousands upon thousands of rupees to children on the beach at Chennai, and reveled in their conversions to vegetarianism (Micah) and Jnana yoga (Leah). Mostly, however, India made Micah cry. This wasn’t an unusual reaction to the country, where American women had been known to come sniffling up to hotel registration counters after staring out the window openmouthed on the five-mile taxi ride from the Mumbai airport. But Micah’s response was different from that. It wasn’t the makeshift blue shanties and lean-tos, or the women thrashing clothes on rocks, the men squatting to defecate in the shade of Peepal trees, or the naked, cinnamon-colored children cooling themselves in puddles—all this was too familiar, even nostalgically comforting, to faze her. What wrenched her, instead, was the unnatural
landscape
of the poverty: the scale, the density, all the degraded details. The coolant-green, battery-acid-yellow swirls in the puddle those children were cooling in. The mustardy burning-trash haze that strangled the breeze those women were sucking into their lungs as they paused between thrashings. And the hunger: the everywhere night-and-day hunger that seemed to her so impossible—how could so many be so hungry and contaminated, yet the earth still be spinning, the newspapers publishing, the factories factory-ing, the lovers loving, the preachers preaching? How could God justify this lopsidedness, with endless Hamburger Helper granted to one side of the world and what looked like
nothing
to the other?—and yet so insurmountable, so unrelievable at the same time? It can’t be like this but it is; it must change but it can’t. A thought scratched at her: Was this the World her father had warned her about? Was this sensation of enraged helplessness, rather than God’s voice, what had sent him into the woods?