Carola Dibbell - The Only Ones

We went under some trees.

I heard a baby crying in a building once. But I don’t feel like telling him that.

He had another drink. “I saw Dewey Sylvain deliver one once. Back when there was still much need for that kind of work.” He shut up a minute. “Real Renaissance man. He went outatch out for the neck of thePennsylvaniaof9H on a job with Dad once and delivered a pair of goddamn lambs! The guy was a research fucking scientist! Literally! Got his hands into everything. Used to say, it’s all about the hands. To be fair, I don’t think he was any better than Dad when it came to enucleating cells under a goddamn microscope! That’s tricky.”

Now out of trees.

Here is another thing this rube will do. He will say something, then look over at me like, you agree, right?

So I’m like, I agree. Sounds tricky to me.

Yup.

We pass, I think it is a house, but dark. No lights.

When he smacked the wheel this time, the truck slid sideways, and when he tries to steer the other way we slid almost to a tree on the other side, till he finally got us going straight, but we did go off the road, even with the lights, so many times that maybe you are starting to wonder do I have second thoughts about this job? And not because of the Knights of fucking Life, who were pretty interesting, to tell the truth, with those lights and that noise, and, I mean, they rode horses — horses! But how this guy drove? You could say I’m lucky to be alive.

Phone in one hand, bottle in the other, we go sliding back and forth across the road — the guy’s steering with his elbows — bounce over a bump, and, splash! Slush at the bottom. Mess on the windows. He jumped out and cleaned them all around, front and back, and he left the door open, so I just smelled whatever is out there which, whatever it is, I never smelled it before. We head off again and he hit another bump and the whole thing happens again.

I never had so much fun in my life.

Bump! Splash! Slide!

Go through trees again. Hit something in the dark. Come out on a great big open space and now he shut up. He will do that sometimes. Talk, talk, talk. Then shut up.

He turned on a side road with one of those blinking lights like at the Farm. Some fat guy in overalls opens up and leads us down his road to a little house. Rauden set up a cable from the truck to the side of the house for a charge, and I went in where a woman in a long check dress let me use the toilet, and here’s something else I never did, saw a toilet like that, so shiny. Jars with pink things in them. Pictures on the wall of little girls in hats.

Rauden had come in the house for a hot Beverage and bread while the truck charged, and the woman gave me some too while Rauden told them how Daisy is doing, and the guy told Rauden he heard an Inspector is coming around tomorrow, and Rauden says thanks for the heads up, Walter. So this was Walter. I didn’t hear the woman’s name. She didn’t hear mine either. Rauden just said he’s bringing me to Bernie. When he told them that, they just look the other way. Walter and the woman walked us to our truck and patted Rauden on the back. We’re off.

You could see real good now with the truck lights, and the moon helped too. There was a kind of metal tower far off. We seem to head toward it. Then we come around a bend so you can’t see the tower any more but are turned so we got a view of smoke coming up even now from Harold’s, behind a hill, and Rauden whispered, “Fucking cretins.”

Then he shut up.

Ok, let me say something else about how this guy talked. You could not understand a word he said. Like DVM. So that is veter whatever. That is a big help, right? Well they are both doctor for animals. DVM and vet. They got a doctor for animals! Who ever heard of that? But sometimes you hear vet and it means GI, so watch out. Words could mean two things or mo that. I tell you that.si operationonre. MD is regular doctor, and you are going to hear about OBGYN which is another kind of regular doctor, though shady. IV, IVF, PBJ, SCNT, ASAP, ova, solos, sperms, somatic this, embry on that, plus you already heard enuke whatever. Rubes need to talk a funny way so no one will know what they mean or they will end up in jail or worse, but sometimes I think Rauden just liked to mix people up. And I will tell you this. It worked.

“Genes were Dewey’s main interest. Got carried away sometimes — well! Dad always said that first Subject in the modification Project would have died anyway, how things turned out in fucking Baltimore. Never figured out why that flu hit them so bad, when DC got out of it with just a few thousand deaths.”

Ok, that worked. I am mixed up.

“See that?” Now he’s pointing to something downhill on his side of the truck. “One of Dewey’s later Projects — started in ’42. That’s two fucking years after the Big One. Most people who were still alive were just ready to roll over and die. Dewey said, let’s make the best of our situation. We all felt that way. All the rubes.”

I looked where he pointed, downhill. It seems to be poles coming out of the snow with fans on the end? Then big plexi boxes with something in them, maybe vegetables. You could see this real good under the moon. Then more poles, with wheels on them, going around and around. Then nothing.

“The college let Dewey teach here after Hopkins threw him out, and I guess he was lucky to get a job, but they were lucky too. Dewey would do fucking anything. Plants — soil — software. Very gifted hacker. And of course the medical work — not even in his area of specialization — brilliant guy. What he did for those poor little kids who ended up at the clinic here — well, you wouldn’t know what he did even if I told you, but it doesn’t always work. He got it to work. The problems those poor kids had — the thing with the eyes, dear God. Henry and I were barely in our teens but Dewey said bring them into the Project. They’ll learn something about human beings. We fucking did.”

Then he shut up and drove.

“Larraine? Wake you up? Could we stop by?”

We’re heading uphill now, and on both sides are that kind of tree you would see in a picture of Christmas? He has been quiet for a little while but I guess can’t stand it for very long.

“Do you see a lot of kids in Queens?”

So now I got to talk too. Ok. “Sure. The mothers like to hide them, but a lot of times you could see them hiding in the toilet in some park.”

“In the toilet? What do they hide from? Vigilantes?”

“Inspectors.”

“Inspectors. Do you get a lot of those?”

“Well, the ones from Staten Island Dome,” I go, “not so much. That’s Ethics. They got a uniform.”

He shuts up, because we are going through a bridge that is like a little house, with walls, and makes a lot of noise to drive through. When we’re on the other side, he says, “And what do Ethics do?”

“Take a bribe.”

He laughed and laughed. “Ours too. But what is it about? Life sales?”

Ok, I’m not going to answer that. You’re asking for trouble even talking about Life, let alone sales. You cannot sell Life. Unless you got a license to find a working Board leave operationon. I just told the guy I didn’t know.

“And Health Inspectors?” He has to steer hard around a big rock.

“No, you see them a lot. They are like, did you take your shot? Did your kid take her shot?”

“Nobody wants to take a shot?”

“Some do.”

He needs to turn pretty hard now, how the road went. “I mean, you can’t blame people,” he goes, “what ends up in some of those damn vaccines. What happened to those poor kids Sylvain tried to help — well, that was more by way of their Parent’s exposure — GIs, a lot of them, shot up to the gills with every kind of goddamn untested thing some mega could make a profit off — breaks your heart, but it was never as common as people thought. Vaccine Syndrome can be mild. Beats polio, for sure. Even measles are no walk in the park. Those stupid vaccine boycotts. Everybody wants to go back to the goddamn Stone Age! You have no idea what I’m talking about,” he said.