Lauren Groff - Arcadia

Bit can barely hang on to the wheelchair as they slide on the thin path beside the stairs, his puny hundred pounds no match for Abe’s mass and acceleration, chill mud splattering over Bit’s bare chest and face.

The helicopters vanish over the forest to the north, though they are still loud. Above the noise, Handy is roaring. He has gone half bald since the troubles began and hides his vaster forehead behind a folded bandanna. He stands like an orator on the terrace to address them.

. . they’re looking for a reason to shut us down, he’s shouting, and we’re so stupid we’re giving it to them. Old bastard Reagan and his war on drugs are fucking here, guys. So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to go pull up that fucking weed and burn it. Now, now, now.

Peaceful Handy, Buddha Handy, furious, his face purple. The charge to the air is electric. Bit finds that he has stepped behind his father’s chair.

But Abe’s shoulder is knotted and shaking under Bit’s hand. His voice rises, and as it does, the world seems to constrict. Fuck, Handy, no consensus? he shouts. No Council of Nine? Just handing out the diktats, yeah?

Handy searches out Abe, and when he finds him, he takes off his glasses and carefully polishes them on the hem of his teeshirt. His movements are slow and deliberate, and in the space he opens with his silence, people begin to murmur, to call to one another. But when Handy puts his glasses on again, it is as if he has miraculously peeled the anger from his skin. His body has softened, his hands have unclenched, his face spreads out in its old magnetic smile, only a gray eyetooth these days to mar it. The change in the bodies around Bit is swift. He can feel the crowd relaxing, the energy unknotting, shifting out toward Handy.

Fine, old buddy, Handy says in his concert-loud voice. You’re right. Soon as the Council of Nine was voted in, I got left to do the more spiritual guiding. But, listen, I got a personal stake in all this. When Titus’s dad sold us this place for a buck, it was my name they put on the deed. Martin “Handy” Friis, that gorgeous Norwegian surname Astrid gave me when we were hitched. Deed’s in the Library, go look it up. So, you know, they’re not going to arrest all nine hundred beatniks, they’ll be arresting me . And, if you’ll remember, I’ve already done time for you all.

He looks from one face to the next. When his glance falls on Abe again, measuring how his words are going over, Bit feels hollow with collective guilt. Five years earlier, the Feds had found a cottage industry of shrooms out of Arcadia and arrested Handy. It was only Harold with his Harvard Law degree who had gotten Handy out.

Let me tell you, Handy says. Even seven months in the hooch is no cakewalk. And so, I respectfully beg of you, beautiful Free People, to do me a solid and go out with me into the woods, and pull up all the hemp that we got growing out there, though it may hurt your souls to see all that good stuff go to waste. Consider it a way to save your old spiritual teacher a shiv in the ribs.

He has won them all over again. It is always so easy for Handy; there is a switch inside him that he can flick on and off. Arcadia laughs. Loudest of all are the Newbies, thrilled to get a glimpse of the legendary Handy, so rarely seen these days. Surrounding him are the old stalwarts, still in love with him, and, closer still, his family. Lila and Hiero chuckle beside Fiona, a woman now, her head against Handy’s legs. Ike is puffed with pride. Leif, alien-blank, stands with the Circenses Singers, Erik is away at college. Only Helle sits gravely on the stone terrace wall, looking up at her father, her face still, her long pale mouth a line.

Wrapped again in Arcadia’s adoration, Handy begins to organize the pull and burn.

Abe spins a wheel to face Bit and Hannah. In a tight voice he says, Stone Family meeting. Now.

In Abe and Hannah’s room on the first floor of Arcadia House, Hannah shuts the window. The Tutorials have resumed in the courtyard: little Peter is repeating something in Hebrew to his tutor, Theo, five feet away. Theo seems harmless, but it is hard to know these days who is on whose side. In the swelter of the close, dim room, the stink of Arcadia House rises to them: sweat, onion, jizz, cheap incense.

Oh, dear, Hannah says. Eau de three hundred bodies.

Bit laughs, but Abe says, We don’t have time for jokes. Hannah raises an eyebrow and opens an orange from the nightstand, a treat saved from dinner a few days ago. The spritz from the skin is immediate relief.

What’s going on? Bit says. He bites a hangnail, calming with the taste of blood.

His parents look at him. Handsome Abe, Hannah golden with her early tan. We should keep him out of it, Abe, she says. He’s still a kid, he just turned fourteen last week. She takes Bit’s hand from his mouth, kisses it, and holds it to keep him from chewing. Her fingers have acid from the orange still on them, and he is glad for the sting.

We need him, Hannah, Abe says. And it’s not as if I haven’t smelled it already on his breath.

Hannah sighs and her hand tightens around Bit’s, and it is all he can do to prevent himself from crawling into her lap.

Please, Bit says, just tell me.

Abe says, Sorry to have to bring you into all of this, but Handy’s minions are out there destroying our next year of groceries. Back in the winter, some of us in the Biz Unit decided to invest in some high-grade marijuana seeds, ready for Cockaigne Day in July. Arcadians who left have agreed to sell to the Outside for us. The Great Pot Plot, we call it.

Bit says nothing, but his disappointment in his parents wings itself, a trapped bird, around the room.

Listen, Hannah says. We know it’s wrong.

Well, Abe says. Debatable. It’s just not legal.

We had to weigh evils, Hannah says. We would never do it if we weren’t so poor. We owe for seed for two years. And there are all the new fucking projects that Handy greenlighted, Astrid’s Midwifery School down at the satellite in Tennessee, the stupid Circenses tour. I mean, Jesus, Handy, put your own house in order first. We owe too much. We’ll starve if we don’t do this, she says, and Hannah’s callused hands clutch the sheet she’s sitting on.

Bit frowns. What about the Motor Pool? The ceramics? What about Monkeypower? All the food we produce? There has to be some other way.

None of those make nearly enough, Hannah says. Plus with the Trippies and the Hens and all those fucking runaways, we have too many mouths to feed. We had no choice. I’d rather risk jail time than let our babies starve.

Amen to that, Abe says, and there is a look between his parents that makes Bit thrill with embarrassment. Sex is a tornado that suddenly smashed him a year ago. It is a whistle too high for human ears, and he awoke one morning a dog. He finds it everywhere, especially where it dismays him: in the bulging, dripping cheesecloths in the Soy Dairy, enormous mammaries; in the slide of a pitchfork through compost like the half-nasty mechanism of intercourse. It is here, in his father’s flush as he looks at Hannah, her own face lit up with certainty.

We need you right now, Little Bit, Abe says. Your mom and I decided to keep the biggest crop a secret from Titus and Saucy Sally and Hank and Horse. For exactly what happened today.

Even fucking Titus, Hannah says bitterly, and Bit remembers, just after the helicopters, Titus’s face cracking open in its old hopeful beam as he watched Handy speaking.

But, Bit says, I’m just a kid.

You’re a kid who can run, Abe says. Bit tries not to look at his father’s legs and fails; the familiar guilt, sickly, greasy, is heaped on guilt. But Abe is still speaking:. . get there first and do anything to keep them from finding the plot. Pretend to be coming back from there, saying that you looked and there was nothing. Make a wild moose call or something. Smack them over the head with a rock.