Lee hunched his shoulders, and set to scrubbing the skillet Ginny had made fried rice in. Damn tasty, and nothing he would have ever thought to cook. She kept the conversation going on light things, asking Juju about where he was from, what music he liked—and the two of them went back and forth about opera like Nonna Quartine and one of her henfriends about the daily soaps. Juju was damn beside himself that someone else knew who that Kathleen Battle woman was.
Lee caught himself listening for Traveller’s noise, filtering in faintly from the front. The house was quiet, but not in the way it had been while it was just him. It felt…good, he decided, to have the kind of calm almost-silence that meant people, his people, were close. Comforting.
Even if he couldn’t stop wondering what was in that damn package, and how it was likely to fuck up everything even more.
* * *
He settled Ginny in the master bedroom, and Juju in the guestroom—the sheets on the bed probably still smelling of the rose sachet Nonna used. Nonna’s antique Singer and the old cherry wardrobe would watch Juju sleep, and Ginny…well. It was damn distracting, thinking of her in Lee’s own bed. No, it’s fine, she said, when he offered to change the sheets. The power might go out with them still in the washer.
Practical. He wouldn’t have thought of it.
Are you sure? Juju kept asking.
You’re company, dammit, Lee kept telling him each time. I want the couch, in case somethin happens. But you can spell me for a watch or two out here, if you’re so damn determined.
Traveller, of course, kept his nose right at Ginny’s heels, and the damn dog was probably going to end up on Lee’s bed. Christ.
He waited a long time, sitting in his recliner and watching the front window full of snowlight. On his lap, the envelope and the package were slight, negligible weight. Lee Quartine had a jelly glass with two fingers of Wild Turkey in it and a whole lot to think about. The night light over the kitchen stove was on, and if it blinked off, he’d know the power was out.
That would give him an entirely new set of problems, and he hadn’t finished chawing at the ones he had.
Inside the envelope was a whole clutch of papers, but the one he spent the longest on was addressed to him in a fine, flowing copperplate script. Grandon had gone to school somewhere cursive was a must. Nonna’s writing had looked like that, but Poppa’s, not to mention Lee Senior’s and Lee’s own, was chickenscratches at best.
Ginny’s writing was just as beautiful as the rest of her.
Son, Grandon’s letter began, and Lee had stopped there for a few moments, looking out the front window, his hand aching to curl into a fist and crumple whatever this was. The woodstove could handle some paper just as well as it handled everything else.
But the files were full of medical jargon, at least from what he could tell. And with people falling over frothing at the mouth, well, it didn’t take a genius to tell they were connected. Grandon had been up to his armpits in this, whatever it was.
When the urge to put his fist through something, anything, had receded, Lee read the rest of the letter.
* * *
Son,
I know you won’t like me calling you that. But I have to tell you, Lee, you’re the closest thing to a son I ever had. I’m sorry it went bad for you. You can’t know how sorry.
I expect you put this in a corner and forgot about it, figuring I’d be writing to tell you to do something. If you didn’t, I’ll be surprised. The papers should be pretty self-explanatory. The package has to get to Georgia. Atlanta, to be precise. The CDC has facilities there. If what I think has happened…but that’s beside the point. It’s got to get down there, son. Anyone else I give it to might get countermanded. Maybe that might even make you do it.
Consider it a last request, because I’m pretty sure by the time you get around to reading this I’ll be cashiered with a niner or something goddamn worse. Remember your very last tour? The vaccine top-ups you got when you came back? They’ll be interested in that down in Atlanta too.
I’ve been in the fight long enough to know what’s going to happen when this thing breaks loose. I wish to God I didn’t.
I mean it, Lee. You’re the son I wanted. I shouldn’t have done what I did. I can pray that God forgives me, but what I am really hoping for is that you will.
* * *
It was signed Harry. Not Colonel Grandon, not with a simple scrawled G like he used to. The stationary said Major General Harold E Grandon. Old boy had got himself a promotion.
Lee sat there in the dark. He took a sip of Wild Turkey and let the burn go all the way down.
The package was a soft case, and inside, nestled in little niches cut from foam, were three vicious-looking syringes. Standard Army issue, capped and full of a vile-yellow liquid. KEEP IN COOL DARK PLACE, the sticker on the outside said, and BIOHAZARD.
Of course he remembered the “vaccines.” Never had them coming back from a tour before, but he hadn’t made a fuss. You learned not to. And now that he thought about it, most of his unit had come down with flu something awful just after Columbia. That was the “very last”, and he’d all but begged Grandon not to send him in. I’m tired of killin, he’d told him. You won’t like what you get, you send me in there.
Afghanistan was bad. Iraq was worse. Then there were the other places. None of his unit had ended up quite…sane? Was that the word? Topper ate a chunk of lead, I-Dog went with drain cleaner, Summers and Blow got the cancer—only maybe it hadn’t been, whatever they injected…had they died foaming at the mouth? Jesus Christ. Then there was Hall, called Hallelujah for his habit of praying before a jump, and Peanut, both just…disappearing. Peanut had a wife; she said he’d just got up from the dinner table one evening, kissed her cheek, said it isn’t your fault, Helen, and walked out the front door in his slippers.
She hadn’t seen him since.
All the things he’d moved back to the Crossing to escape swirled around inside his head now, old bad gas in a mineshaft. He lifted the glass again, but it stopped halfway to his lips.
Lee leaned forward, the chair smoothly rocking with him. Good thing he hadn’t put his feet up. He eased upright, the papers and package falling from his lap with soft sounds, and took a few long swinging steps, ending up in front of the window.
His front yard glowed with snow, strange winter half-light. Lee squinted, restrained the urge to rub at his eyes. His long driveway, the double set of tire tracks pressed into it, the covered mound of the old truck up on its blocks…and the treeline on the far side of the bumpy dirt road. Something flickered there.
Deer. Gotta be a deer.
Except deer didn’t move like that, all jerk-twitchy. It lolloped out of the trees and into the road, and it wasn’t alone. Two more, one ponderously fat with what had to be a hunter’s orange vest flapping around its capacious, stained gut, the other small.
Child-sized. And wearing a bright-orange cap, if Lee’s eyes didn’t miss.
Lee realized he still had the glass halfway to his mouth. He lifted it the rest of the way, and knocked back the entire cargo in one shot.
They melted back into the trees, but not before the one in front dared to dart across the street and lower its face to the tire tracks. Its head bobbled, and Lee could swear he almost heard the thing sniff.
“Hell no,” he whispered, unaware of speaking. “Oh, hell no.”
He stood, staring at the treeline, rolling the jelly glass in his sweating hands, for a long time. Until he heard Juju begin to stir in the room that Lee, as a boy, had slept in. Slowly, as if in a nightmare, he shuffled across the room and gathered up the papers and the syringe-bearing softpac.
Better, he thought, to put those out of sight.
Hard Money
Juju Thurgood never thought he’d have trouble sleeping after the Army. You learned to drop off wherever you were, and if you didn’t, exhaustion took care of that for you. And here, in a warm enough bedroom, in a real bed, he should have been out as soon as h
e made up his mind to be.
But nothing in the service had prepared him for this. He kept hearing the awful ratchet-growl sound, Billy’s eyes gone blank and weird and film-grey, the fever splattering them both with sweat and the rank yellowish foam…God.
Juju turned over. The sheets were cool and slick, and smelled of roses. Lee’s house felt different now, too. He’d never stayed the night here before; the killing quiet of snow outside couldn’t cover up the ticks and tocks of the structure settling for the night, or the sense of other breathing presences. It was like when Tip was home, downstairs drinking on the couch or with the teevee on low.
Best not to think about it.
Except who would be able to ignore what he’d done? To the end of his days he’d feel his best friend, his brother’s head cave in under the blows from the ugly-as-fuck lamp in Tip’s bedroom, the one with the heavy glass base he bought at an Atlanta flea market on furlough one drunken afternoon.
I swear, Tip had said, in a hell of dust and noise and blood, if’n we get home, Juju, you and me gonna go into business together.
For a cracker to keep a promise like that, and then get his head beat in…it wasn’t right. None of this was right.
Of course God was a cracker himself, of that there was no doubt. Nothing else would explain the goddamn world. It was just like the big old asshole in the sky to bring Tipton and Juju both safe through two tours apiece with no worse effect than the scar on Tipton’s thigh, some hearing loss, and real juicy nightmares, then turn around and make one man beat the other’s skull in.
Maybe Juju should’ve let Tip bite him.
She bit me, Billy moaned. Lila, Lila…she bit me. More he wouldn’t say, already shivering and feverish. Juju had considered calling the 911, but couldn’t get through. Maybe if he’d been a medic, or something else, he could have…what? Tied Tip up? Administered something other than a beatdown?
Tipton’s hands at his throat, squeezing. Billy don’t…Billy don’t…Tip…
There was an animal inside every goddamn man no matter his color, and that animal wanted to live. Juju turned over again, roughly, his hair scraping the pillow. Checked his watch. Maybe he’d dozed off, maybe not. He didn’t feel rested. Christ, he could have told Tipton that woman would bring him trouble, but how did you tell a man that when he had his mind fixed?
Juju suspected he’d never feel rested again.
Lee was all right, but Tip was his buddy. Ever since Mosul, when they’d shambled together out of the smoking, screaming cauldron, a rough pressure bandage on Billy’s right leg and Juju’s entire body one slow grumbling song of pulled muscles, there was no other word to describe it. In the foxhole together, and out the Devil’s asshole. And Lee, goddamn Lee with his stripes and his cold gaze, too quiet for any real friendship but a steady commander all the same.
Well, lookit what the cat drug in, Lee had said, grabbing Juju’s other arm, ducking under it to help support him. You boys are a mite late.
Fuck…you… Juju had replied, between deep painful breaths. Sir.
The laughter. He’d never laughed so much as he had with Billy. For a white boy, he was pretty fucking funny. And half the garage was Juju’s, on paper and legal. He’d taken it himself over to Lewiston to a black lawyer, and of course you could never relax completely in dealings like that but he’d paid hard money to hear what he already knew: Billy Tipton’s word was good.
To hell with it. Juju sat up, rubbed at his head. Slid his feet out from underneath the sheets, made the bed on autopilot. Bounce a quarter off that motherfucker. The wardrobe in the corner watched him, the sewing machine gilded in a fall of snow-night glow from the window.
Company, Lee called him. What Juju really wanted was to hear Tip stamp his feet and bellow, Juju, you home?
Even when he knew, he liked to ask. Or he wanted to make sure he wouldn’t get shot by a nervous sentry. Habits did that to you, burrowed in all over like ticks and refused to leave. Silence was for enemies, for the knife and the hand over the mouth.
George Washington Thurgood, nicknamed Juju by his blessed mama, exhaled hard as his chest seized up. Her bent over, wheezing a little, and waited for it to pass. God wasn’t just a cracker. He was a monster.
Not because he’d taken Tipton, but because he’d left Juju alive.
Utilitarian Argument
Ginny wished she could fold her arms. As it was, she drew herself up, full height, and fixed Lee Quartine with the glare that usually worked on people who got carried away at the computers on a quiet library afternoon. “How about you back up and try that again?”
Juju had already excused himself to take Traveller outside, even though she’d just brought the dog back in. It didn’t take a genius to figure out he wanted to get away from this conversation. Her hair was probably sticking up every which way, and she usually had trouble sleeping in unfamiliar beds. Last night, though, she’d zonked out as soon as her head touched the pillow. Even if it smelled like someone else. Which wasn’t…bad, precisely, but now she was uncomfortably aware that she’d been in a guy’s bed. On unwashed sheets.
It felt too…personal.
Lee stood in his kitchen, the window over the sink glowing with directionless, snowy light, and took a gulp from a mug with a faded, much-washed Army logo stenciled on the front. His bloodshot eyes were back to dark hazel, and his cheeks were freshly shaven. “We’ll go looking around town. You stay here.”
“Repeating yourself is not an explanation.” She tried for a reasonable tone, found it. Her own mug—thank God she’d packed decent teabags—was big enough, but it had a stenciled NRA logo, of all things. It warmed her hands quite nicely. His collection of dishes was was just what you’d expect, even if there was Wedgwood in the china cabinet in the dining room. Every house she’d visited here had one of those hutches, usually stuffed with dusty Depression glass and mismatched teacups with “gold rims.”
That, of course, led her to her neighbor Amy’s pride and joy, a teapot painted with overblown tea-roses and its cracked, delicate, matching cups. At least Amy’s hutch in the dining room had been left unscathed, even if everything else had been smashed.
The thought made her stomach curl up around the pancakes she’d cooked this morning, and she leaned against the silverware drawer, its ancient brass handle digging into her hip. The pain was welcome, it steadied her.
Lee’s hair was messy too, and there were dark circles under those bloodshot eyes. It didn’t look like he’d done a lot of sleeping last night. “Truck might not be the best, once I don’t know the roads. Juju and me’ll go looking for what we can find, and supplies too. Might as well stay where it’s warm.”
That part was reasonable enough, but she wasn’t going to be distracted. “Where exactly are you going to find supplies?”
“Wherever we do, might be some of those foam-mouthin’ bas—uh, I mean, folks, around. Juju knows how to shoot.”
So they were both going to go out armed. That was troubling enough, but he really hadn’t answered her. “Are you going to steal a car? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Ain’t sure it’s stealin’, at this point.”
Well, that was a utilitarian argument if she’d ever heard one. “All right. And you intend to shoot someone?” She leaned a little harder into the silverware drawer, its pressure reminding her to keep her temper.
“If it looks like they gonna bite me or Juju.”
Again, reasonable enough, but not quite what she was asking, and he probably knew it. Ginny, unfazed, was not about to let this go. “Are you going to shoot someone and take their car?”
“Don’t see no need for that.”
Well, it was good to know carjacking wasn’t his plan. “And you want me to stay here.” Little woman waiting in the cave while Big Grok goes out to hunt, is that it? Irritation bit briefly at her throat, she kept her tone level. Of course they assumed she’d do the cooking, and that was fine, but this was something else again.
“You ever gone
hunting?” He took another gulp of coffee and winced. It was undoubtedly too hot. He probably needed the caffeine, though.
“No.” Not unless you count cadging free drinks in college. “I just think we should stick together. What if something, you know, happens?”
“You’re better off here, with the genny and woodstove, and the truck. And Ol—I mean, Traveller. You can get out to your folks in the spring, if this thing don’t blow over by then.”
“Blow over.” It goes all the way up to Pennsylvania, for fucksake. How far west did it go? Hadn’t she heard something about San Diego?
The past few days were receding like a nightmare, but not nearly quickly enough. There was no waking up from this. There was no blowing over, she thought. And spring was…God, that was months. Ginny’s toes curled inside her thickest pair of wool socks.
He took another gulp of coffee. This time he didn’t wince at the scorching. “You worried we ain’t gonna come back?” Did he actually look slightly pleased at the notion?
Oh, for God’s sake. “That would be a reasonable thing to be worried about, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sure. I’d also say you can see if my phone’ll work for your folks, and see if you can get a signal on the tee-vee. See how far this thing’s spread. If a ’mergency broadcast shows up, be nice if someone was here to get it.”
Ginny didn’t point out that they could all just turn the fucking radio on in whatever car they ended up in. “Fine.” She blew across the top of her mug. His phone was a landline, and he was right—she could start dialing, see if she could raise someone, anyone. Maybe he even had cable out here in the sticks. Christ knew these people loved their cable tee-vee.
“And you can look around and think about what we need for travelin’. Juju and me, well, we run light. But you might, you know. Need things.”