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“Yo, Rob, I’m running out for a fill and to find Palm. Get the tent aired out, will you? And no fucking around down there. ”
There was a grunt from the bedroom, and the Rob-shaped mound shifted beneath the covers. Conner gathered his canteens: one on the hook by the door, an old beat-up one of Vic’s sitting in the window like a relic or a piece of decoration, and a third he’d hidden on top of the kitchen cabinet. He strung all three over his head, grabbed all the coin he owned in the world—which fit easily in one palm—and called into the bedroom again.
“All right. I’ll be back. Don’t sleep till noon, man. I want to get going early enough we aren’t figuring the tent out in the dark like last year. ”
Conner sat on one of his sister’s old chairs and grabbed his boots. Then he spotted his dad’s boots where he’d dumped them the night before and decided to wear them instead. Maybe he was already thinking about his trip that night and wanted something of his father’s with him, or maybe it was just to keep Rob from getting into trouble while he was gone.
The band and a tangle of wires his brother had rigged up hung inside the right boot. Conner looked for a way to unplug the thing. He glanced into the bedroom, but the glorious Cocoon-of-Rob had not opened and sprouted its precious little butterfly, so he didn’t ask. He saw how the band split in two, little metal contacts soldered into snaps, and took it apart. Each half went up a leg of his shorts and out at his waist, snapped back together, and then the band went into his pocket. It was eerie how well the boots fit. He felt a little older as he grabbed his ker, stepped outside, and shook the sift out. He left the door open to let in the light and keep Rob from oversleeping, then set off toward Springston.
His first stop would be the Honey Hole. Palmer would’ve hit their mom up for money, no doubt. And then he’d try the dive school. As much as he dreaded visiting the Honey Hole, morning was the safest time of day. Not because he minded the patrons and bar fights and the slosh of beer downstairs, but because it presented the best chance of catching his mom when she wasn’t working.
The Hole was on the edge of Springston, right between town and the sprawl of shacks and shops that made up Shantytown. The location kept the riffraff who worked and drank there out of the town proper while also keeping the alluring fruit upstairs well within reach of the Lords and the wealthy. No one wanted to walk through Shantytown to find a good time. It would annul the effects of the carnal visits during the long stagger home.
Beyond Springston loomed the great wall where Conner had been born. The towering edifice of concrete rose nearly a hundred meters above the sand, had been erected generations ago by a rare union of Lords in the most massive of public work projects. It was said that this wall was bigger than any of the last and would stand for all of time. It now leaned noticeably westward over Springston, had angled itself toward the nicest parts of town. Any view of the wall reminded Conner of the first six years of his life. The good years. There were the baths he could submerge in, covering his whole body and even his head. There had been electricity and toilets that flushed—no going out to shit in the sand and having to dig his own hole only to find two other shits already buried there. These luxuries he remembered that Rob would never understand, luxuries he had to share with his brother like stories about their dad. They were half-memories of things blurred by childhood and by having taken those years for granted.
Nearer to him, rising up between two of the sandscrapers, was a column of black smoke. The top of the column sheered off into wisps as it rose past the lip of the wall and met the wind. Conner thought he’d heard a rumble in the middle of the night. Another bomb. He wondered who the fuck this time. The self-styled Lords of Low-Pub? The brigands up north? The dissidents there in the city? The FreeShanties out in his neighborhood? The problem with bombs when everyone was making them was that they no longer stood for anything. You forgot what the fuck for.
He rounded a low dune and approached the Honey Hole, a building no one would ever bomb, not in a million years. The various brothels along the edges of Springston had to be among the safest places across the thousand dunes. Conner laughed to himself. Probably why the Lords spend so much time in them, he thought.
He kicked the scrum out of his boots before pulling open the door and stepping inside. Heather was behind the bar, drying a jar with a rag. A lone man sat on a stool in front of her, bent over with his head on his arms, snoring. Heather smiled at Conner before glancing up at the balcony that ran clear around the second floor. “She should be up,” she called out, not bothering to lower her voice. The man in front of her didn’t stir.
“Thanks,” Conner said. Up was where he liked to find his mom. Standing. He headed for the stairs and nearly tripped over a drunk sleeping on the floor. Foreman Bligh. Conner resisted a dozen spiteful urges and stepped over the man. It was easy to blame people for the misery of life rather than blaming the sand. Yelling at the sand got you nowhere. People yelled back, and at least that was a response. An acknowledgment. Being tormented and simultaneously ignored was the worst.
He marched up the stairs toward the balcony, old wood creaking with each step, and couldn’t imagine being one of the drunks who took this walk in full view of their friends. But then men bragged about whom at the Honey Hole they’d bagged the night before. Enough trips up those stairs, and maybe it feels normal. Fuck, he didn’t want to get a day older. He imagined sitting down there getting hammered out of his skull one day, a beard down to his navel, smelling like a latrine, then paying someone to lie still while he fucked them.
As much as the entire scene disgusted him, Conner knew that most men ended up right there, hating their life and trying to avoid it. One night of escape at a time. Drowning their misery with a bottle and paying for a brief spasm of lust. It would probably get him too, as much as he hated the thought of succumbing to that. It would get him too if he stuck around. Man … he remembered wishing life would rush along, that time would hurry up and go and he would get older already, but now he wanted it to stop. Stop before shit got any more dreary than it already was. If life would stop moving, maybe he could clear his head. He wouldn’t have to run out on it.
He paused outside his mom’s room, almost forgot why he was there. Palmer. Right. He lifted his hand and knocked, really hoped he didn’t hear a man barking at him to scram, this one’s taken. But it was his mother who opened the door, a robe draped over her shoulders. She tightened it up and cinched the sash when she saw who it was.
“Hey, Mom. ”
She turned and left the door open, walked back to her bed and sat down. There was a bag beside her, a roll of cloth laid out with brushes. Lifting her foot to a stool, she went back to painting her toenails.
“Slow night,” she said, which Conner tried his damnedest not to picture the meaning of. But trying made it happen. Fuck, he hated that place. Didn’t know why she didn’t just sell it and do something else with her life. Anything else. “I don’t have a coin to spare,” she told him.
“When’s the last time I came here asking for coin?” Conner asked, offended.
She glanced over at him. He still hadn’t stepped inside. “Wednesday before last?” she asked.
Conner remembered that. “Okay, fine, but when before that? And that was for Rob, just so you know. The kid has fucking holes in his kers. ”
“Watch your language,” his mother said. She jabbed her tiny brush at him, and Conner resisted the urge to point out that her profession sorta depended on that word.
“I just came to see if you’d heard from Palmer. Or maybe even Vic. ”
His mom reached for the bedside table where a curl of smoke rose from an ashtray. She took loud, popping tokes and got the cherry glowing again. Exhaling, she shook her head.
“It’s that weekend,” Conner told her.
She turned and studied him for a long while. “I know what weekend it is. ” A column of gray ash fell from her cigarett
e and drifted to the floor.
“Well, Palm promised he was coming this year—”
“Didn’t he promise last year?” She blew smoke.
“Yeah, but he said he was really promising this time. And Vic—”
“Your sister hasn’t been out there in ten years. ” His mom coughed into her fist and went back to work with the little brush.
“I know. ” Conner didn’t bother correcting her. It’d been eight years, not ten. “But I keep thinking—”
“When you get older, you’ll stop going out there too. And then poor Rob will go out on his own, and he’ll make you feel bad for not going with him, but it’s him you’ll feel sorry for, and you’ll sit around and wait for him to grow up and figure out what the rest of us know. ”
“And what’s that?” Conner asked, wondering why the hell he even tried anymore.
“That your father is long gone and dead and the more you go on wishing he weren’t, the more sick you make yourself for no good reason. ” She studied her handiwork, wiggled both sets of toes, and screwed the small brush back into its little bottle. Palmer tried not to think where she got little artifacts like this. Scavengers and divers trading for her wares. Fuck, his brain was obstinate.
“Well, I guess I came by for nothing. ” He turned to go. “By the way, Rob says hello. ” Which was a lie.
“You ever think about what I named you boys?”
Conner stopped and turned back to his mom. He didn’t answer. He’d never thought about the fact that she’d named them at all. They just were.
“Palmer and Conner and Rob,” she said. “All of you little thieves. I named you after your father. ”
Conner stood rooted in place for a moment. He didn’t believe her. It was a coincidence. “What about Vic?” he asked.
His mom took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled a fountain of smoke. “When I had Victoria, I didn’t know your father was a goddamn thief. That he was gonna run off and leave us with nothing. ”
“He wasn’t a thief,” Conner said. “He was a Lord. ” He tried to say it with conviction.
His mother took a long, deep breath. Let it out. “Same damn thing,” she said.
14 • Sandtrap
Conner left the Honey Hole and kicked along the edge of Shantytown. He stared down at his father’s boots and thought for the first time on his name and the names of his brothers. Palmer, Conner, Robert. What kind of shit was that to learn? And it was like she’d gotten more blunt over time. Had to be a coincidence. Something her madness had dreamt up after their father’d left. He hoped his mom never told Rob—the kid would be crushed. Would take to calling himself Bobby.
Conner crossed a low dune between a freshly collapsed house and a new one under construction. A handful of men were hauling material from the ruin and nailing it back together two dozen paces away, once again forestalling the inevitable. The most disturbing thing about the scene was how normal it seemed, how many times Conner had watched this play out in Shantytown, a ruin serving as the foundation for new construction. But now his mother had him seeing the commonplace in a new way. If anything, this alien view strengthened his resolve for that night’s plans. It undid what a beer and rabbit stew with Gloralai the night before had started doing to his head.
He cut through a row of apartments that abutted the back of the dive school. Palmer was probably back at his place right now helping Rob unpack and air out the tent. But still a good idea to check the dorms and see if he’d crashed there the night before.
Ms. Shyler waved from her porch as he passed. She went back to sweeping the sand out of her house, when one of her kids stomped inside, transferring some of it back. She turned and yelled at the boy, was her own sissyfoot in a way. They all were. The men building the house from the remnants of a house, all these tasks that required doing over and over with no end in sight, filling canteens and eating, shitting, sleeping, looking forward to a weekend and dreading the week that would come after. Life was lived by sissyfoots, all of them. One bucket of sand at a time.
He had to stop thinking like that. There was progress somewhere. Something better. That’s what the slow stagger of men, women, and families believed as they marched off toward the horizon. They believed in a life far away from the fighting and the bombs. Away from the riots and the patter of morning gunfire. Away from the shops where sunlight and sand filtered through bullet holes in wrinkled tin. Away from Lords with fickle rules and those who meant to topple them with indiscriminate bombs.
There had to be a reason so many left and never returned. It was the allure of a good life. Or simply no longer being able to stand the sound of distant grumbles, drums, and thunder without feeling an urge, a compulsion, to go see for themselves. That’s what his father must’ve believed. It had to be what he felt. Conner’s mom was just trying to poison the memory of the man because she hated her own life. That was it.
The door to the dorms was open, letting the light and a swirl of drift in. Conner stepped inside. There were two dive students in the back of the bunkroom, a clatter of dice. They turned when Conner’s shadow darkened the pips. “Have you guys seen Palmer?” he asked.
One of the boys shook his head. “He and Hap are out on a dive. They’re not back yet. ”
“Wasn’t that a week ago?” Conner asked.
“So it was a long fucking dive. How should I know? They were all secretive about it. ”
“Yeah,” Conner said, dejected. “Thanks. ” Another year of disappointment from their big brother. Poor Rob.
“Yo, please kindly shut the fuck up,” someone called from one of the bunks.