Ben Bedard - The World Without Flags

The next room is ours, and it’s the only one where the entire door is made of bars. He opens the door with a clang and pushes Eric inside. Then he makes a face and glances at me. “Hold her,” he tells the other bandit behind me, one of the new ones I don’t know. I feel his arms grasp me tightly by the shoulders. It hurts but I don’t show it.

Squint moves inside and I can’t see what he’s doing. My heart stutters with the fear he’s doing something to Eric, something horrible just to prove he can, the way the man poked that poor woman’s eye out. I’m shaking despite myself, but not out of fear. I feel energy pulse through me, and I begin to think, to plan what I’ll do if I hear him do anything to Eric. I will drop out of this idiot’s grasp, turn around and punch up quickly right between the moron’s legs, and when he bends over, I’ll push my thumbs through his eyeballs. Then while he’s screaming and cursing, I’ll deal with Squint as best I can…

But that doesn’t happen.

Squint walks out of the prison cell holding something. I can’t tell what it is for a second and then I recognize it: it’s the maple and oatmeal bar that Randy gave me back at the Homestead. I forgot all about it. Now I remember slipping it in one of the pockets of Eric’s overalls before we left the Homestead. I’d totally forgotten it was there. It seems like another life.

“What’s this?” Squint asks me. I shrug. He crouches down in front of me, and unwraps the bar. The smell of the maple sugar makes me weak with hunger, but I hope I don’t show it. He’s staring at me with his one good eye. The other one is milky blue, with a dark center, like the yolk of an egg that’s gone very, very rotten. “How long you known about this, eh?” Squint asks. I shrug again, and he smiles and then takes a bite out of the bar. He chews it slowly in front of me. “Niggers don’t know how to share, do they?” I try not to move, not to clench my jaw or my fist. Not to have any reaction, nothing he can use as an excuse to beat me, which is what he wants.

Squint sniffs loudly and then takes another extravagantly large bite out of Eric’s bar. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” he tells me as he chews wetly. “Monkeys don’t share neither, you know.” He looks at me, searches me, hoping I’ll do something, say something. When I don’t give him anything, he continues. “Monkeys, dogs, and niggers,” he says. “None of them know how to share.” The last of the bar goes into his mouth. He pokes me with a finger, hard, right on the breastbone. “And you know, sharing is what makes a community, isn’t that right, Henry?” Squint turns his head toward the man holding my shoulders.

Henry laughs. “You are one hundred percent correct there.”

“That’s why we usually kill niggers,” Squint continues. “We want a civilized community. This isn’t the jungle. This isn’t Africa, is it?” When I don’t answer, he pokes me hard again. It hurts like hell, but I don’t show it. I won’t ever show it. “Is it?” he insists.

“No, sir,” I answer.

“You can’t survive out here without a sense of community,” he tells me. “You need to rely on each other when winter comes, isn’t that right, Henry?”

“Winter is a hell of a thing,” the other man answers.

“Where there’s winter, there’s a sense of community. Where there’s summer all the time, shit, it’s like monkeys and dogs. Every asshole out for himself. That’s why niggers don’t share and Jews just take advantage of everyone.”

“No sense of winter,” Henry says. His fingers dig into my shoulders.

“No goddamn sense of community,” Squint continues. Squint eyes me, like he’s expecting me to argue with him. He’s hoping I’ll say something, so he can lay his hands on me. I won’t give him that satisfaction. I just stand there, quiet, trying not to look like how I feel. “It’s a wonderful thing the snow brings,” he continues. He counts them off on his hand. “A sense of community, honor, white skin and blonde hair.” He pops the rest of the maple bar into his mouth and smiles as he chews. “That way we know who to kill.” I’d like to tell him his hair isn’t blonde, but I’m not stupid.

“White skin is God’s badge of honor,” Henry adds. “That’s the truth.”

“Just to let you know,” Squint says. “Keeping you alive isn’t my idea.” He stands up, grabs me by the shoulder, and flings me into the room. I don’t weigh much, so I practically fly through the air right into Eric. We both collapse in a pile, and I struggle to get away from Eric before he accidentally bites or scratches me. When I disentangle myself and stand up, Squint is standing at the door. “Thanks for the candy bar,” he says.

Then the two men leave the hallway, and my face contorts into anger, the first time it’s been allowed to be free in days.

“Unh,” Eric says. He’s still on the ground, his face pressed onto the concrete floor.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “Me too. All of them.”

When I settle down and stand Eric in the corner of the room, I have time to think. The rain pounds on the steel roof, filling our prison with a raucous sound, like standing underneath a waterfall. Eric is on the tips of his toes, straining upward at the sound of water, as if he doesn’t understand he can’t fly. It’s good to have Eric near me again, even though the smell of him in this confined space is nothing less than an abomination. I’m glad he’s avoided any permanent harm like that poor woman, but I don’t feel good about any of this. I don’t know why they’ve taken Eric alive, or myself for that matter. But it can’t be good. I have to think of a way out of here before it’s too late.

“Unh,” Eric grunts, straining up toward the water.

“I’m thirsty too,” I tell him.

After exploring my surround and a few hours of thinking, I’m not sure there’s anything I can do to help us escape. The door is securely locked. There’s a slit of a window near the roof of the cell, but it’s too small for a cat to climb out of, let alone two grown people. The door is too firm to force open, and even if it weren’t, all the noise we would make by breaking it down would only bring them running. The floor is made of concrete, so there’s no digging our way out, and the ceiling is steel. We’re basically sealed in here. I can’t think of any way to force our way out. Even if I were to trick one of them into opening the door, even if I were able to overpower them without getting hurt, even if all this noise didn’t bring more, how could I lead Eric out unseen? He won’t run. He won’t hide. He won’t do anything, but be an obvious zombie. Even if you couldn’t smell him from half a mile away, just by glancing at the way he moves that he has the Worm. I was lucky with Boston and Sidney, they still hadn’t heard about the return of the Vaca B. All these bastards know. They can spot a zombie a mile away.

I look over to Eric. I shouldn’t think of him as a zombie, I really shouldn’t. I study him, looking for signs of the man I knew, who raised me, but it’s like trying to see the bottom of a lake through muddy water.

But in the past few days, I’m more grateful to him than I was before. I was never stupid about the way people looked at me, about the way they saw me because of my skin. How they always wanted to touch my hair. How people would look at me when they thought I wasn’t paying attention, not with hate exactly, but just studying me, like I was something strange that they were always trying to understand. At the Homestead, people never treated me like these bandits had. Even the ones that came to trade, even the ones who looked at me with eyes of hate, they didn’t dare say anything, not in front of Eric, who was so obviously my protector. No, they were always good to me. Because of Eric, I never had to endure the hatred, the pure animosity that I feel from these bandits. I wasn’t naïve or anything, I mean, I knew people were like this. Eric had always told me that I had to be careful, that there were people who wouldn’t like me because of the color of my skin, that there were those who would want to hurt me because of it. But it’s one thing to know it in your mind, to know it’s true, to see little glimpses of it hidden in the attitudes of strangers, and it was something else completely to see it naked and revealed and shameless.