M Coe - New Veronia

“The thing is, I thought they would find us before we got all the way to here. They’re great; they would take us in… there’s this network. We stick together; we got to. But I guess we’re lost.”

“You wanted us to go stay with the Eye Whites? Instead of my mom? Why didn’t you tell me before?” The termites glowed a little in the dark, and I followed their paths with my eyes.

“You acted all prickly, calling us ‘skinheads’ and all that, like we’re some creepy gang, so I figured you had to nut up first. Then you’d be surprised when you met them; you’d be so happy. You know what?” His voice grew stronger. “There are white people we’re against, too. Those Greenies. They want to save a tree, a tree’s more important than a job. They want the factories to disappear to get rid of their smokestacks. We’d stomp those bammers. We’re against them, too. We have principles.”

“But maybe it’s better this way,” I said. “My mom will cook for us, remember? She’ll have a room for us.” Jay’s Eye Whites sounded less appealing than my mom, but Jay and I were in this together, and we were brothers—even if what he said was inane, we relied on each other like brothers. They were just words.

“You’ll figure it out for yourself.” He flicked a termite off the back of his hand. “I mean, all you got to do is look around at the world, is live a little. You know why we’re called the Eye Whites? Because that’s the part of someone you see, when they get scared: the whites of their eyes. And our enemies, those people against us, they’re always scared, and that’s because they know they’re wrong.”

“But they aren’t here. They didn’t find you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.” He curled up tighter into himself as the termites made a path over his left shoe. “It’s my fault,” he mumbled. “I couldn’t find their radio station. They have one somewhere around here. Ham stuff. And I didn’t see anyone in the truck stops, but maybe they had their tattoos covered...” Jay sat there, kind of catatonic, and so I gathered as many dry sticks and bits of leaves as I could find around the perimeter of our little camp, dug a pit, and used our book of matches to start a fire. The flames reached up, a couple dozen grabbing at the air, and just as quickly they died down, everything burned away before I could even unwrap my Slim Jim to warm it. Jay held his hands over the curled-up worms of dead leaves, the first move he’d made to interact with the world since he’d acknowledged that the skinheads weren’t coming to save us.

We bedded down on the ground. Dampness seeped from the earth where my hip pressed against it. I had this feeling like, now that Toshi was gone, Jay and I were the last two people on earth. We’d been left here in the reeking dark after everyone else had escaped to somewhere better.

I had to shake this idea out of my head; I was starting to scare myself. “We’ll find my mom,” I said to Jay. “We’ll find a phone book. It’ll be easy. At her house, you can use the radio all you want.”

Jay said, “What’s she like? Your mom.”

Closing my eyes didn’t make much difference, it was that dark. But I closed my eyes anyway to try and say something that might make Jay feel better. “She’s pretty,” I said, “with blond hair; what do they call it? Ash blond. But she was real nice; she would bake you cookies whenever you asked. Every Sunday, she went to church. She liked those shows where you guessed the price of stuff, everyday stuff like toasters and end tables. Real nice lady.” Some of this I truly remembered, but some I made up because I thought Jay would like it. “Probably as soon as we find her she’ll bake us something. Casserole, brownies. Something.” Maybe she would be happy to see me. Maybe it was a whole big misunderstanding that I figured she never cared about me, never thought of me. Maybe there was another explanation for her cutting off all contact with her son, like my dad had warned her away, or he’d acted like such a drunk that she couldn’t stand to be around him. I guessed I’d be finding out pretty soon.

After Jay fell asleep, I tossed back and forth, my heart racing. No matter how deeply I tried to breathe, my blood kept whooshing anxiously through my veins. I reached into my pocket for Stella’s panties, which I wrapped around my right hand into a puppet. My knuckles made little bumps for the eyes and, I don’t know, it was stupid, but I felt comforted looking at this strange, sweet purple thing. “Stella,” I whispered, “I feel a little crazy here. I mean, look at me—talking to you this way.”

“It’s perfectly understandable,” Stella said.

“But if Jay saw me doing this, he would hate me.”

Stella said, “No, he wouldn’t feel that strongly about you: you’re nothing to him. Jay doesn’t care about you. Not really.”

“Don’t be mean,” I said. “He does. Even if he doesn’t show it. I need him.”

“You don’t need anybody.”

I petted the purple face. Stella was brutal in the way of siblings, but somehow she knew: once things were normal, I’d never speak to Jay again. We wouldn’t be friends. And this fact took the top off of my head.

But out here, where I felt lost and hungry and thirsty and, pitifully, scared like a little kid, I needed him. He was still my best friend. “Something will happen soon,” I said; “maybe I’ll make something happen, but not yet.” This moment between us, this conversation, had framed out a whole new dimension of my world, which had been revolving tight around Jay for years. Before, I had felt certain that I’d never be able to change the pattern, but that was the night I started to think that I could.

I must have dozed, because I woke up feeling chilled. The night air was mostly warm, but something had frightened me into consciousness. Then I heard it again: a long, low howl that crescendoed into a high-pitched yelp. My arms prickled over with goosebumps as I unwrapped Stella’s panties from my fingers and stuffed them back into my pocket.

“Jay.” I shook his shoulder. “Jay, what was that?” He pushed me away, but I pinched him until he woke. “What kind of wild animals do they have out here?” I whispered.

He sat bolt upright. “Crocodiles,” he said. “We should sleep in a tree. Bears can climb trees, but I know how to handle a bear.”

“That’s not what I heard. It was a wild dog, a wolf, maybe. Crocodiles don’t yelp.”

We listened for a while, but the sound didn’t come again, so we climbed up a tree and kind of slid down into the big pocket the branches all made where they came off from the trunk. Up there, I thought about the Zimzee, his scratchy bark fingers slipping off his victims’ skin, his dark mouth and blood-covered wood chipper teeth, his breath smelling like malt liquor.

“Every year,” I said, “thirteen people under the age of eighteen are eaten by wild animals in Florida.”

“What?” Jay said.

“One in eighteen people will get malaria. One in twenty-seven, rabies.” At first, I didn’t know why I was making up statistics, but then it dawned on me that I liked the way it pushed panic into Jay’s breath. “Five in eighty-seven will contract giardia.”

“Stop it,” Jay said. “What’s wrong with you?”

My channeling Toshi in this way, through his obsession with statistics, upset Jay, and this relieved me because it showed that Jay had cared for our friend, after all. “Four in five will drive drunk, but only sixteen percent of those will get caught.”

“Stop it, man,” Jay said, his voice breaking. He was thinking about Toshi; he was remembering how close we’d all been. I was glad for this proof that he wasn’t too different from me.