I shrugged and wandered up to the barkeep, still gripping Stormi’s hand. “Excuse me. Is this Bishop?”
“Pretty much.” The guy didn’t look up. He shifted his readers, stroked his gray stubble, and yawned. “Can leave ‘m on the pile.”
A stack of church bulletins, stained and dog-eared, rested to his left.
“I don’t have one.”
“Hmm. Your loss. What didn’t happen in church this morning, we’d have got done for you tonight. Free drink in exchange for your church bulletin. Maybe go find one and come on back.”
I’d never seen a man so wholly disinterested, so vacant, but I had questions that needed answering.
“If we wanted to find a place to stay nearby, where’d we look?”
“That be dependin’ on your definition of nearby.” He removed his glasses and set down his paper. Checking us over, his gaze landed on Stormi and stayed there. He glanced over my shoulder at the men seated in the bar and lowered his voice. “You seem a piece more desperate than most drivin’ to Cimarron. Plenty o’ places you shouldn’t stay in these here parts. Move on. Quick and quiet. There’s a Super 8 in Boise City not sixty miles west, near the mesa.”
“We could make that,” I said, turning to Stormi. Post-seizure exhaustion was sinking in, and my judgment was turning foul. Sure, I had originally chosen Bishop, but Stormi counted on me to provide safe quarters, especially after the events at the station.
“Seems quite a trip this late. You look tired.”
We spun around in time to see a clean-shaven man in his thirties rise from his table. I hadn’t noticed him before.
“I know a place not eight miles from here. It’s no Super 8, but it provides two beds. And believe you me, it’s private.”
I glanced at Stormi and back, mustering my strength. “We need three beds. We’re not really together.”
He let his gaze run over Stormi. “There’s a shame.”
“I mean in the sense of together that you might think we’re, or two of us are, together—”
“Two beds would be wonderful.” Stormi wrapped her arm around my twisted trunk.
A whisper in my ear. “You don’t want to be going where he’d be taking you. Death there.” But when I turned, the bartender was back behind his paper.
“What’s the name of the place?” I asked.
The man walked up to us and reached out his hand, first to Arthur, then to Stormi, and finally to me. “Names are nothing compared to what it offers. Seclusion. A place for the weary to find rest.” He gestured toward the front door. “Out away from the world and all that comes with it. It’s up to you, of course, but there’d be minimal cost and you could up and on your way whenever you so choose.” He paused. “Nothing asked. Nothing required.”
I froze. I’d heard that phrase before.
“So it’s not a hotel? How do we know it’s safe?” Arthur whispered far too loudly.
“Safe? Is that what you’re looking for? I s’pose you can’t know for sure. But young folk don’t come out here to be found, they come out here to get lost, and that, friends, I can guarantee.”
The three of us huddled, but nobody spoke. It was a horror movie set-up. But our truck would soon be located, which meant a hasty shipment back to Gullary, and Stormi would have nothing of it.
“What’s your name?” Stormi asked.
“Sixty-one.”
“Your name’s a number?” I asked.
“Your given name,” Stormi asked, her voice firm and terrible.
His face twitched, as if fighting a return to some place he should not go. “Winston.”
She stepped toward him, holding him in that horrible Stormi gaze. “Nothing asked.”
He smiled. “Nothing required.”
Stormi turned to me. “We need to go where Tres will lose our trail. This is our chance.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in chance.”
Stormi peeked at Winston. “We’ll follow you.”
Arthur and Stormi wandered toward the door, and behind me a paper rustled furiously. I glanced over my shoulder, and the bartender caught my eye. “Be gone by morning. You don’t want to meet Q.”
I frowned and followed my friends out into the night, my fingers grasping the chess piece in my pocket.
Q. The queen?
Avoid Q to prevent more loss. Tres’s note read itself in my mind.
This was my second warning. Yeah, by morning we would be gone. One way or another.
Our destination snuck up on us like a star-eating mass, a dark collection of lightless structures that blocked out horizon-hugging constellations. We followed Winston’s truck to a row of garages, and he hopped out and lifted a door. He waved us in, and Stormi obliged, parking behind a white Chevy. Winston quickly pulled in behind us.
The garage was built three cars deep, and we were wedged in the middle.
We would not be gone in the morning.
“I don’t like anyone who gives his name as a number. Is that even legal?” Arthur shook. He was losing it. “I don’t like staying with strangers. I don’t like anything about—”
“Arthur!” Stormi said. “It’ll be okay. Jonah brought us here. It’ll be okay.”
“Now hold on, there’s a little error in that narrative. You okay’d the sleeping situation. You said, and I quote, ‘We’ll follow you.’ It’s not like I had much to do with us coming here, as in, right here. Bishop, yep, but I was tilting Super 8. But you, when you get all confident and Stormi-voiced, it usually means, you know, you have it under control.”
Stormi stroked her necklace. “I don’t have anything under control, Jonah. I can’t feel anything. We’re following you.”
“I’m following you, Jonah. I’m right behind you.”
I had been on my way home from Percival’s, Gullary’s food mart/video store/dry cleaner. Folded over my left forearm was a suit, on the eve of my first suit-wearing occasion, the spring formal.
The dance had once been a prom—at least in the old yearbooks, it was called a prom—but something foul must have happened in 1980, because in 1981, there was no yearbook, and in ’82, the event had become a highly militarized spring formal. It remained so right up to my senior year.
I wanted to survive it, survive my first and only trip to it. Of course I was going with Stormi. She would look beautiful. I’d forced in the thought of her, and pressed out the voice of Connor, striding three feet behind me. Why he was trailing me home, I could not say, other than the cruelty of man.
“They have strobe lights. Strobe lights cause them seizures, right? That would be embarrassing.”
Think about Stormi.
“It’d be a sight, seeing you foam all over her.”
I stopped and turned. “Why? Why do you do this to me?”
Connor licked his lips, reached out, and snatched my suit. He gently laid it on the ground, and dug his muddy heels into it. Again and again. Then he carefully picked it up, folded it over my arm, and walked away. “Have a nice evening, Hunch.”
Why had I watched? Why didn’t I make a move to protect what was mine?
Why had I been so weak?
I showed up at the dance two hours later, my black suit blotched with oil, my red tie and once-white shirt the same. Yeah, I wore the outfit. I felt I deserved it. That somehow the grotesque covering matched the gruesome interior.
Chaperones manned the three escapes from Gullary Golf’s nine-hole public clubhouse. Chaperones wandered among the dancers, enforcing the bodily contact rule with vigor. But it still appeared to be the highlight of most students’ year.
Stormi stood by herself beneath the disco ball. I think the other girls kept distance, as compared to her, all their fashion efforts paled. She stood waiting for me in a short, deep red dress, which swished gently over her beautiful thighs and was hemmed beneath her knees. I figured right there that the red dress would pretty much destroy every other couple’s chance at enjoying the event; for a guy, to see Stormi that night was to wa
nt her.
I know I did.
It mattered little. Old Rickety took me by the punch bowl before the first dance. Soon I was drenched, tinted orange, and carted home by my dad.
Apparently, Stormi stayed and danced the night away.
I’m glad she got to enjoy the senior formal. It was a really pretty dress.
I came to in blackness.
Stormi had hold of my left hand, the one I could feel. The right was still numb, along with that side of my body.
“Welcome back.” Stormi smiled. “Sorry we didn’t get that dance.” Her voice softened. “I’m also sorry I didn’t stay with you. It still could have been a great night.”
I glanced at her, my mouth unable to speak. She must have been recounting the night of the formal. Somehow her words pressed in, even while I writhed in the garage.
“How would . . .” I fought through the fog. “How would it have ended?”
Stormi leaned over and kissed my ear. “With you and me.”
“It always ends with you and me, but it never starts that way.”
Her head paused, her hair falling over my face. “Don’t start this now.”
“I never do.”
Stormi straightened and gave my hand a squeeze. “No, you don’t. You could have a thousand times, but you don’t. You’re the only gentleman I know.”
“It hurts to be me.”
“I know, Jonah.”
We fell silent in the dark, and I thought I might have caught her sniffing, but my senses still weren’t trustworthy, and I lay still beneath her touch.
“Well, Winston wasn’t lying. Two beds,” Stormi whispered, and nearby Arthur snored. She looked off. “The other is already claimed.”
I was so tired, the implication didn’t strike me until morning, when I woke with Stormi nestled in the crook of my arm.
How could she see me at my most disgusting and still come near? How could she embrace a monster? That kind of affection only lived in moms and God, and I wasn’t even sure about that.
But she was here, and I leaned over and smelled her hair. “Do you enjoy irony?”
Arthur stood in the corner, posture impeccable, his hands folded in front of him. Maybe he was off somehow. When it came to Arthur, maybe God had withheld or given too much or just plain got tired of cookie-cutter personalities. But his back; it was beautiful. He was beautiful. Straight and solid. Vertebrae lined up like soldiers at attention, ready for any order.
Sure, I held the girl, but in that instance, would I have traded my support for his?
I’m ashamed of my answer.
“Irony,” he continued, far too loudly. “You came to this place to flee Tres, who you think brought you here.”
I frowned. Put like that, it was clear: Tres had hopped off the edge of my life and run to the center. He was the reason for everything. I slowly pointed toward Stormi and mouthed, “She doesn’t know that.”
“Irony number two. For the second time in as many days, you and I are trapped in a cell together.”
“I wouldn’t call this a cell. It’s comfortable enough.”
“It’s a cell. What kind of people get a place to stay for free and aren’t asked to do anything?”
“Uh . . .”
“Prisoners, which makes this a cell. It has a pretty girl inside, but it is still a cell.”
“I think you’re jumping to conclusions.”
“And, since nobody walks into their own cells—”
I thought of Mom. Presumably, she chose to walk down the aisle with Dad.
“You’re wrong.”
“No, I’m not. Nobody walks into their own cell. They are always led.”
“You’re still wrong.”
“So,” he continued, “we’ve not been choosing. We must’ve been led, and people who lead need to know a little more than those who follow. We’ve been led by someone . . .” He lowered his voice; not low enough, “Who knows events before we do.”
I squinted and pointed at Stormi. “What? Storm—? No. She’s terrified. She’s running. She’s following me. Said so herself.”
“She followed you here?”
“Well, it’s not quite how I remember it, but she said she did.”
Arthur grinned a very knowing grin. “I think you may be in bed with the enemy.”
“Shut up. Stormi is not the enemy.”
“I think, if you keep following her, pretty soon you will be on a poster.”
“We are on a poster.”
“Not a wanted poster, a missing poster. That’s irony number three. You’re about to have your picture on two different kinds of posters.”
I puffed out air and Stormi rolled, her peaceful face inches from mine.
Arthur doesn’t trust you. Sleeping with the enemy.
Did you lead us here?
The door burst open.
“Up! All of you.” Both the voice and the face were weathered and husky. “Welcome to the Hive.”
CHAPTER 11
The old man disappeared outside, shutting the door behind him.
“The Hive. So, are we bees now? What does that mean?” Arthur spoke to no one in particular.
“Bees work.” I stood and stared around the room. I’d not planned well for an extended trip.
Outside of my ill-fated sojourn to the Mayo Clinic, this registered as the longest I’d been away from home. Well, aside from April’s Boundary Waters fiasco.
Oddly, the only pleasure trip I’d taken had also sent me north, way north, up through Wisconsin, creeping west to Minnesota, ending a stone’s throw from Canada. There, you find the Boundary Waters, aptly named as they form the watery barrier between us and the Canucks.
I had no will to camp, but Ma looked online and located a Boundary Waters expedition specifically for epileptics. Strange, my warped spine had dominated early teen-hood forming the misshapen trajectory of my life and dominating Ma’s concern. But when Old Rickety moved upstairs, my back and its limitations were often forgotten. Which is the only excuse I can think of for sending me alongside eight able-bodied campers and a doctor for a ten-day canoe trip.
There was little in Oklahoma to compare to the Boundary Waters. Oh, the Ozarks has its share of lakes and streams, but the sheer volume of water, the pristine quality of the Boundary Waters—you could drink straight from the lakes without worry of amoebas—this was unheard of, and I admit, climbing into the canoe, I thought it: who knew Minnesotans and Canadians had a corner on heaven?
Five minutes in, I discovered that heaven carries a steep price. With a sixty-pound Duluth pack strapped to my twisted back, we prepared for the Grand Portage, a mile-long hike through the forest, during which we’d be hauling all we owned. Our goal was to achieve the next lake.
My fellow campers were an odd collection, bound only by the sickness dormant in our minds. Three girls, two of whom displayed a radiant kind of beauty, were among our number, and pride set in, a disastrous visitor for the feeble.
“Yeah, I can carry a pack and a canoe.”
This was the line that did me in. To my credit, I managed for half a mile. Hunched forward, I carried the canoe upside down—an oversize captain’s hat concealing my head—stabilized by shaking hands. Aching shoulders felt the weight of the crossbar, but the unusual hunched position provided a strange relief to my lumbar.
At the midpoint I reached a summit, glanced down at a treacherous path, and met Old Rick. He took me at the top, flinging me forward. I do not recall the tumble, and in fact have but flimsy memories of the next two days. That I fell is certain, as Kylie, the prettiest of our group, snapped a photo of me laying face-first at the bottom of the hill, my body eclipsed by canoe, arms stretched out on either side.
Dr. Medroni forced me to sleep in his tent for the remainder of the trip, like a needy child requiring constant observation. From a distance, I witnessed love blossom between four campers. Perhaps it was an appropriate penalty for thinking of other girls beside Stormi. But I returned home feeling less, beli
eving that adventures were not for me.
Still, this trip felt different; I felt different. And not even Arthur’s ironic distrust of Stormi could mute that fact. I was leading. Well, maybe leading, while Stormi maybe followed. She had done more than share a tent; she felt at peace in my bed. That had to count for something.
Stormi flattened her hair and straightened wrinkled clothes.
First thing, take my medicine.
Crap.
“I don’t have meds, Stormi.”
“None?” She paused and looked at me with impatience. “You didn’t pack any?”
“Yes, I packed them, but I was hurried out of Gullary, remember?”
“Fine. I’ll figure something out,” she said, heading toward the small sink. How quickly the girl I held all night could turn.
In truth, seizure meds—items compulsively hoarded back home—were the least of my worries; they didn’t work anyway. However, my lack of fresh clothes felt urgent, as I still smelled faintly of gas. Stormi, too, appeared lost as she washed her face and stared vacantly into the mirror.
A tiny wooden shack, with two windows propped open for ventilation, containing two beds, a toilet, a sink, and a small desk and chair. That is all there was.
Okay, so maybe it is a cell.
“Hurry on, miss.” Our wake-up caller reappeared. He sounded tired, though morning was barely upon us. He slipped inside and eased himself down on Arthur’s mattress. I didn’t imagine there was much hurry left in his aged, arthritic fingers.
Stormi wiped her face and set down the towel. “Ready.”
We stepped out into morning, for the first time taking in our surroundings. “Well, we’re still in Oklahoma,” I said. All year long we’d run fifteen degrees above normal. This was made clear by my skin, not my eyes. The unusual heat came quickly, as it often did in Gullary, but this heat felt different; it was a saturating heat, and I wanted nothing more than to duck back into shade. To the right, Oklahoma stretched out forever, and in this forever, there was a refusal of anything to be hidden. One could see for miles, from the deepest, bluest sky down to the reddish hue of the horizon; it was the uncovering of all things. And I felt uncovered as well.