Part 10 (1/2)
It was a good solid yellow soap, and it worked well enough in ice water. I took my change of clothes with me and washed out the dirty ones, carried them back to the encampment, and hung them on the community line, along with my washed-out, wrung-out towel.
Then Chuck came and got me for lunch. With his drooping mustache, he looked like a Scandinavian travel advertis.e.m.e.nt. Haris had made some deerburgers, fried with onion. They sat me at the middle of the table, where I could get the full benefit of the love-buzzing, the hush whenever I spoke, the smiles and eye contact and shameless flattery. Yes, they all knew as soon as they saw me that I would be a wonderful addition to the group. Just wonderful. Just what they had been waiting for. Persival and Alvor sat alone at the other table, talking in low voices.
The conversation was slightly strained, and I guessed it was because they felt they should not talk about Nicky, but he was ever-present on the edge of memory. I made a few fruitless efforts to steer the conversation toward politics and violence, but they fielded them deftly and threw to another base.
After cleanup, a screen was set up and a projector wheeled out. I thought I was going to hear a tape by the celebrated Sister Elena Marie, but it was a cranky old black-and-white motion picture about The Long March; with a noisy sound track, a voice-over with a marked British accent, a lot of running, shooting, and gesticulating. They marched across China and up into the hills and caves, while my chin kept dropping onto my chest and I kept waking with a start. It ended with a loud blast of martial music which roused me enough to get up and say good night and go back to my trailer. I couldn't find the light switch and finally gave up and went to bed in the dark.
I was awakened by the click of the latch on the flimsy door of the trailer, a stealthy and barely audible squeak as it was opened. I wondered if one of the team had decided to correct Persival's decision to keep me alive. I moved in the bunk until I had my shoulders against the wall, until I was braced to move as quickly as I had to.
The generator was silent, the encampment dark. Just enough starlight came through the window above the bunk for me to make out a pale figure moving toward me. It stopped a couple of feet away, and I heard a silky whisper of fabric, caught a faint scent of female, and realized that Nena or Stella was paying me a visit. I guessed I had been asleep for an hour.
She picked up a corner of the blanket and came sliding into the bunk, shuddering with the cold, reaching to embrace me. I faked a great start of surprise.
”It's me, Brother Thomas,” she whispered. ”It's Stella.”
So I was being gifted with the sallow blond lady with the inadequate jaw. ”What's going on?”
”Well, whatever you want to go on. Okay?”
”Whose idea is this?”
”What difference would that make?”
”I'd like to know.”
”You do a lot of talking, huh?”
I caught her questing hand by the wrist and took it away from me and said, ”Is there anything wrong with wanting to know?”
”Look, are you okay? I mean, you make it with women?”
”I like to talk first.”
”Jesus Christ!” she said. And then, ”I'm sorry. That's blasphemy. But, you know, you are something else.”
She turned onto her back, trying to separate herself from me totally, but the bunk was too narrow. Hip rested against hip, shoulder against shoulder.
”All it is,” she said patiently, ”you're new. Probably they don't want you being restless and wanting to sneak off or anything. So you get food and shelter and, once in a while, a piece of a.s.s. What does it cost? Nothing but time, right?”
”You sound as if you did some hooking.”
”I was into it. So?”
”Where was that?”
”So you're another one of those.”
”Another what?”
”When I was a hooker, there was always a trick who wanted to know how I got into that line of work.”
”Stella, settle down. Where are you going, anyway? Why the hostility? I can ask about you because I'm interested in you, can't I? Is there a house rule against that?”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ”Well, okay. I'm sorry. When I came in here, I was really ready, you know? I don't feel that way very often. But what happens, you want to talk. So I'm losing the edge. It's fading on me. I think I got that ready on account of Nicky dying. Death does it to me in a funny way, I guess. When somebody you know is suddenly dead forever, then I want to get laid. I've heard lots of people are like that. Like in shelters when there's bombings going on. Maybe it goes back to instinct. Like in animals. If people are dying, it's time to make more people and keep the population up. But there was a couple of years there when I couldn't have come no matter what.”
”What do you mean by that?”
”If you want talk instead of tail, I'll give you talk. I'm from an absolutely nowhere place. Opportunity, Montana.”
”Little west of b.u.t.te? South of Anaconda? Flint Creek Range and the South Fork?”
”Hey, you heard of it!” She turned and settled herself more comfortably, fitting the nape of her neck to my arm, one hand resting on my chest. ”Been through there. When did you leave?”
”A long time ago. I don't know who's left there, if anybody.”
”Run away?”
”Sort of. With a girlfriend. We got in with some rough people in Miami. I got busted for possession, and when I got out, I couldn't find her. A cop put me on the streets, hustling. Then one day he beat me up bad because he thought I was holding out, and I met some people from the Church of the Apocrypha.”
”In Miami?”
”You'll find the Church everywhere these days. What I was thinking, I could use the Church. They'd take care of me and keep that freak cop away from me. I'd been beaten real bad. What I was then, I was a dumb, selfish, ignorant teenage hooker. What I needed most was some rest from cruising the streets and taking the marks back to that motel room. When I was rested up, I'd take off. But the people in the Church, they knew what I was thinking every minute. They never gave me a minute alone. They loved me. They believed I was precious and they made me think of myself as precious to them. I was a lazy little s.l.u.t, and they cured me of that. My G.o.d, I never worked so hard and so long in my life. It made hooking seem like picnics. Dumb dreary food and not enough sleep ever. Fifteen hours at a stretch, selling stuff to strangers, walking the streets carrying candy and thread and junk, begging money, making quotas. My weight went down to minus nothing. A lot of my hair fell out. I had a scaly rash all the time. I forgot about s.e.x. I stopped menstruating. My t.i.ts and my a.s.s like to shrunk away to nothing. And when I was about to believe the life was going to kill me, suddenly I realized I was doing G.o.d's work, and that I wanted to drive myself even harder than they were driving me. And once I saw the Light and heard the Word, I started to get better. I ate tons of that sorry food they served at the dorm, and it tasted delicious. And I began to sell more stuff. I made people buy it. I turned in big scores every night and slept like a baby. I smiled and sang all the time. The Church had put my head back on straight. For the first time in my life I was really part of something. My life had meaning. I worked hard for the Church and for myself, and finally, they picked me for a different kind of work.”
”This kind? Guns and bombs?”
”It's G.o.d's work.”
”You said you joined the Weather Underground, didn't you?”
”I didn't join them. It was sort of like cooperative, you know? They bought me a plane ticket out to Portland, and a fellow met me at the airport and drove me practically all day in an old car way down into empty country where they were. I thought I was in pretty good shape, you know? Talk about p.o.o.ped! I used to get so tired I'd cry. But by three months, I could like run all day, you know? And I felt really alive. Then, when I could move right, they started all the other stuff. Weapons, marksmans.h.i.+p, cover and concealment, grenades, b.o.o.by traps, reading a compa.s.s and maps, and all that. They taught me stuff I never heard of. You know, I could go into the average kitchen anywhere in the States, and in about twenty minutes I could build a bomb you wouldn't believe, just using what's already there.”
”I forget where you said you went after that.”
”First I went back to Miami, and they took me... someplace where I met Sister Elena Marie, and it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. She's fantastic. She knew allnabout me. She even seemed to know what I was thinking. She told me I was doing very well and I was one of the special ones planned by G.o.d for a special purpose. They got me a pa.s.sport to Amsterdam and I went with a Brother who'd been there before and from there by car to Sofia, and he turned me over to some sort of official who took me out to the camp. It was a lot the same as Oregon, except different weapons and a lot of stuff I can't talk about. And, well, I got back to Miami, let me see, this is right after Christmas, and so it must have been seven months ago, and so I've been here six months. And maybe it will be six more before we... begin.”
”Begin?”
”You know. We have to be given our a.s.signments and we have to have a lot of time studying and working and planning so that it will all be automatic. Then we'll just, you know, go do them. It has to be all coordinated in order to work. We all have to be terribly, terribly careful.”
”I saw you practicing something, you and Nena, and I think it was Haris and Ahman. Chuck was coaching and timing you.”
”Oh, hey, you shouldn't have seen that! Please don't tell anybody, or somebody will get in trouble for not figuring out maybe you could see it. We didn't know what would happen with you, and we thought you would probably be killed. Maybe that's why somebody got careless. But there is always the very small chance you could get away, and if you could make somebody believe you when you told what you saw, then it might make big problems here.”
”What were you doing? Your a.s.signments?”
”Oh, no. That's just the Circle of Fire. It's all in the speed, getting ready. Then it's tricky howyou set the weapons. You put them on full automatic but you have to learn to give just the quickest little touch. Bzzzzt, bzzzzt, bzzzzt, like not more than five or six shots each burst. You touch the trigger when the targets are thick enough in front of you. You keep it at belly level, because that's the way the most damage is done in a crowd.”
Yes, indeed, I thought. Get the adults in the belly, the kids in the chest, and the littles in the head bones.
”Will that be your a.s.signment?”