Joshua Gayou - Commune - Book One

“Right,” I said. “Sounds good.”

“Okay,” he continued. “Jake and I’ll double up in the blue tent; you and Lizzy take the green. We’re a pretty good distance from Cedar City now, but on the other hand, they do have a really nice van now… assholes.”

Despite everything we had just been through, I couldn’t suppress a grin at this. Billy really liked his van.

“Anyway, no fire tonight and I think we’d better keep watch. Let’s get some sleeping bags laid out. I’ll help Jake get settled in, and then I’ll take the first watch. I’m not feeling very restful, myself.”

We went to the Jeep and opened up the door. Jake stirred and mumbled, “Time to get up?”

“Let’s just start with sitting up, Whitey.”

“The hell you always calling me Whitey for?”

“Because,” Billy laughed, “You da White Man, sucka.”

“Heavens,” Jake mumbled. “Anyone ever tell you that you talk like a teenager?”

“Look, you gotta hang onto your youth however the hell you can.”

Jake sat his seat up, grimacing in the low moonlight as he did. A wet, folded up scrap of cloth fell from his eyes, which Elizabeth reached out and caught. I noticed that his right hand was bound up in a clean, white bandage. “His nose is all wrong again,” Lizzy said.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Guess I fell on it a little.”

“How is it?” Billy asked. “You want to fix it or leave it?”

“Ohhhhh, man,” Jake groaned. “We’d better deal with it. It’s giving me a nasty headache.”

Billy motioned for Lizzy and I to back up, then he raised his hands to Jake’s face. I saw Jake’s hands grip the frame of the Jeep’s door and brace. The muscles in Billy’s shoulders tensed and Jake’s knuckles went white. Jake himself unloaded a growl that sounded like a hot poker had been shoved up a grizzly bear’s behind.

“God damn it, we’re not quite there, boss. Gotta do it again.” I could see Jake’s head nodding past Billy. Shoulder muscles tensed a second time, and Jake howled.

“Grrrrraaaarrrrghhhhh—shit!” Billy pulled back and pointed a flashlight in Jake’s face as he sat there, panting. Presently, Jake looked at Lizzy and said, “Sorry for that, kiddo.”

“Okay…” said Elizabeth in a small voice.

“Hey,” he reached out and patted her shoulder. “I’m okay. I actually feel better. The worst part of my headache is gone. It feels like he pulled a knife out of my head.”

Lizzy looked at him dubiously. This probably had to do with the fact that both his eyes looked like someone had been pounding on them with a hammer and that there was blood running freely from his nose, which he dabbed at absently with the wet cloth.

“I don’t know how well that’s going to heal up,” said Billy. “There’s not much of that bridge left but splinters and floating chunks at this point. I feel like a proper doctor would know how to support it all somehow so it heals properly, but I haven’t the first clue how to go about it.”

“It’s fine,” Jake said. “I wasn’t winning any modeling contests to begin with. Just gimme an old t-shirt that I can rip up and pack up there, and I’ll be okay.”

“Yeah, good idea. I already have one started.” Billy walked back over to the truck.

I leaned in close to Jake. “You’re going to have to take it easy for the next few days, okay? You can’t push yourself. You might make this worse.” I left the implication unsaid. I didn’t want to bring out the big guns unless he decided to be stubborn later.

He only nodded slowly. “I understand. Any idea how long it’ll be?”

“Well, Billy seems to know something about this. He says you’re probably okay when you start acting like yourself again.”

“Like myself? What does that mean? What am I like?”

“Well… you know…” I stammered. “Quiet all the time. No expression? Cold and aloof? Block of wood?”

Jake was silent a moment as he absorbed that. Then he looked down and placed the cloth back under his nose. “Huh…” he said.

Billy came back with a white, mutilated t-shirt and cut some small squares off of it with his pocket knife. Jake accepted them, rolled them into little tubes, and jammed them up his nostrils. He growled like an old drunk as he mashed them into place.

“Alright, you guys,” he sighed. “I think I’ve had enough of beating my face up for the night.” He stood up, looking much steadier than he had earlier when we carried him out of the warehouse and made his way to the tent. Lizzy was there holding the flap back for him. He stopped to look at her, reached out, and cupped her cheek in his hand. “Thanks, kiddo,” he said and hunched to crawl in. I thought about what Billy had said to me earlier that day about Jake and Elizabeth, deciding that Billy was probably much more intelligent than I gave him credit for.

“What about his head?” I asked Billy. “Don’t we need to stitch it up?”

“I cleaned it out with some alcohol and had a look at it,” said Billy. “The bleeding has stopped. There might be a small scar, but I don’t think it needs stitches. His hand will definitely need some stitches, but that can wait until tomorrow. I’ve got him pumped full of Ibuprofen and Amoxicillin so it won’t go all infected. We’ll keep him on both for another week, and he should be good.”

We got Jake situated in the tent and Billy gave me a new scrap of wet cloth from the remains of the t-shirt to place over Jake’s eyes. As he lay there, I leaned in close and said, “I want to thank you for protecting my little girl.”

“If I’d been thinking, we would have cleared that damned warehouse before doing anything else. This whole thing was my fault.”

I boggled at this. I failed to understand how any of this could have been laid at Jake’s feet. It was something we would all come to learn about him eventually. The way Jake sees things, it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are—if something went wrong, it’s his fault. His natural instinct is to assume the blame for what happened and find a way to avoid the same mistakes in the future. People around our little commune all have their own ideas why Jake ended up in charge (and some of them are less happy about it than others), but whatever they tell you, this is the main reason: Jake owns everything whether it’s reasonable or not, seeks to improve everything. He’s always looking for failures in himself and ways to correct them. It is easy to follow someone like that.

“Elizabeth is alive and unhurt,” I told him finally. “That’s good enough for me.”

I kissed him lightly on the cheek and left the tent.

Billy was sitting in a folding camping chair outside and facing the 15 about a half mile distant with his shotgun propped on the top of his thigh. “Lizzy’s already turned in,” he said quietly.

I threw my arms around his neck from behind him and kissed him on the cheek. “The hell??” he gasped. He came halfway out of his seat.

“Just thank you,” I said, not letting go. He rested his shotgun across his knees with his right hand; his left hand reached up and gave me a couple of pats on the back of my head.

“No worries. It’s fine,” he said. I let go and made my way to our tent.

“I… uh… I had a daughter,” he said before I entered. I froze for a beat; looked back at him. “Mary. You would have liked her. I think her boy and Lizzy would have been friends.” He replaced the shotgun on his knee and said nothing more.

I climbed into the tent and laid down next to Elizabeth, not taking my shoes off and not getting inside my bag. After a few moments, her hand reached out and found mine.

I breathed deeply and closed my eyes.

I laid there in the tent for what must have been at least a couple of hours waiting for sleep to find me before I gave up. Elizabeth’s breathing had become slow and even soon after she rolled over. It amazed me how she could do that after everything she had been through.