The Cause (9 page)

Afterward, we ate breakfast with hearts thumping to find a slower rhythm for the day. Grus and Conroy cooked. They scrambled eggs and fried up bacon in a monster-sized skillet over a knee-high fire. Fumes of grease wafted to our noses, trails of scent heavy in the air as the sun made its way higher into the morning.

Mir and Ayan Shankar came through the woods, their hands full with buckets of river water sloshing over the side. They poured them into a filtration system. We drank, and drank again. Then we filled up our cups and canteens in preparation for the day.

Split, Brock and I sat with backs against a clump of trees scarfing down Grus’s mushy eggs and greasy bacon on flimsy paper plates. Flies buzzed around our food and we swatted them away as they landed. Brock discovered a more efficient approach, bending the plate in two and using it as a funnel. Split and I liked the idea and followed his lead.

It had been a week since I had come out of The Hole, but still I felt a need to bring up the topic. “So there’s one thing about Bunker that I don’t get,” I said. “Rumor has it Uriah killed Bunk not because of any insult, but because he found him coming from out-of-bounds.”

Silence.

“What was he doing out there? What would be the purpose?” I glanced over to Split. He was eying a fly crawling on his arm sucking on a droplet of sweat.

“What purpose does it serve to ask such a question?” Brock replied.

“Aren’t you curious?”

“I don’t see that it matters.”

“Can anyone answer the question? Why was he out that far south? Was he trying to communicate with someone?”

The wind changed and the smoke from the hickory chips in
the fire wafted in the air, the smell a reminder of home, of barbeque and a carefree world. Brock swept the air clean of smoke and looked me over. Shrugging his shoulders, he said, “It doesn’t concern us or our mission here, man.”

“A friend gets decapitated and it’s of no concern?”

“He was no friend of mine. In fact, you’re about the only one I know who liked him. But to answer your question, of course it’s of concern, but any answer is conjecture. We’ll never learn the true story. If you want it, go ask Uriah.”

Split piped in, lifting his plastic fork and tapping the air with it. “We haven’t really even seen what’s coming. But I’m telling you, it’s on the way.”

Crooked-toothed Mir bounced into the conversation and the crossfire of words began. Uriah sat in the distance out of earshot. He peered up from his plate and caught my stare—strange eyes bubbling inside the face of quicksand. I nodded sideways at him in a motion that invited him to join, but he gazed back into his plate and continued eating. Maybe I wanted a confrontation. But he wasn’t going to give it to me. Perhaps he sensed what we were talking about. But the obstinance in him dismissed rumor and innuendo.

Mir edged in again. “All of us knew what we were getting into. Period. None of us were lied to. If Bunker broke the rules, he knew what they were when we got here. If it was an insult, it was an insult. The point is that it doesn’t matter.”

“Exactly what I’ve been saying,” said Brock.

“I’m just saying—what would be the motivation to put your life on the line?” I asked.

Brock and Mir glared at me with edgy looks. The Spanish Monkey scratched his head. Overhearing the conversation, Conroy stepped over while Grus yelled at him to get back and finish the KP.

“Something funny is going on up north too,” Conroy said.

“Like what?” Mir asked with a doubtful tone.

“I was taking a dip in the river, then found a trail covered over next to the outer bank. I took it a ways. I saw Merrill and Des hiking back up it leading a train of horses. The saddlebags were loaded up with something—not guns, not ammo.”

“Supplies perhaps?”

“Something’s just off. Doesn’t it feel off?” Conroy asked.

“Nothing feels off besides this bullshit conversation,” Mir said, walking out of the circle, off to warm his hands in the fire.

“What’s off to me is that fucking Montgomery cat,” Brock said. “Aren’t you getting the point of that?”

“It’s fucked up,” I said. “You got to wonder what the purpose of showing it is. But shouldn’t we be worried more what’s going on right here?”

“Isn’t it obvious,” Brock said. “They’re showing us hard proof how shit is all fucked up at home.”

“What are we supposed to do about it?” I asked, but no one answered.

After breakfast, on the way out of the woods and halfway to the clearing, Mir bumped my shoulder and whispered, “You should talk about these things in more quiet company.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said.

“Don’t be a fool,” he said, jaws clenched. He grabbed my arm, gave it a rough squeeze. I broke his grasp, but let him continue. “You’ve been down in The Hole. So learn how to walk here before you run. You could fuck us all with that mouth.”

“Relax, Mir.”

“You don’t know who to trust, so don’t tell me to fucking relax. You’re playing with lives here.”

The following weeks were dedicated to different disciplines of destruction. Three days of bomb building—mercury switches, detonators, how to build crude IEDs and plastic explosives using bleach to get pure potassium chlorate. Two days of advanced weapons training—rocket launchers, M-32s, how to lay and
detonate different types of mines. Explosion after explosion until vision undulated and the land became variant and pulsing. Afterward, you would drift through a monotone hum of high-pitched noises. Drunk on the fumes of sulfide. Tapped out on adrenaline. War junkies wobbling back into camp. Even with earphones, we still walked around camp as deaf men, screaming at one another after a day with the rocket launchers. It didn’t help that we were forced to speak Yoncalla.

From there, we moved on to part one of poison theory—three days of shellfish toxins, snake venom, frog poisons, tubocurarine plant life. We set up a laboratory tent and learned how to mix doses, dip blowgun darts, freeze tiny needles the width of a human hair that would disintegrate on impact with a high-powered dart gun. We studied the effects on the human body. Antivenoms. We rubbed the bark off strychnine trees. Then we broke into groups with blowguns and stuck each other with small quantities, watched one another get sick and go
limp
. Then two days more of application: loading tiny needles into dart guns with telescopic sights; scoping out animal targets at two hundred feet, the poison melting undetectably into the skin. We brought back wild boar, rats, and other small rodents. We skinned and gutted them and cut up the meat and left it in the middle of pit traps to see if the degree of toxicity was enough to kill anything eating it.

Nights were rest periods—campfire dinners, storytelling, and lessons in Yoncalla. Kumo, Des, Merrill, and Ahanu monopolized the conversation, speaking mostly in brittle Yoncalla, forcing us to partake by pointing and jeering at one of us and laughing amongst themselves. These nights Seee kept his distance from us. Perhaps the feeling of separation between leader and the led kept him away. But even though he was absent during these mystical evenings, he grew in our hearts. Each of us feeding on stories about him from the Sons. My mind battled the obligation I promised to fulfill, my word and a sense of duty still
outweighing what was happening in my thoughts.

Then one night, I followed Seee through the woods as a sunset flopped in the sky over a skillet of clouds, rims singed with golden fire. I kept a large distance between the two of us, enough so it would be impossible to hear my footsteps. Sometimes I couldn’t see him through the thick of the woods, and I snuck toward him solely on instinct. When we walked deeper in the jungle, my pace quickened to catch him, but as I got closer, he disappeared from the path. Within a cluster of trees, I felt him staring at me, picking my intentions apart as a fisherman sheds the slimy scales of a fish.

I called after him. “Feel like company on your evening stroll?” I felt a presence behind me. Was this what I learned in the darkness, deep in The Hole? How to sniff out ghosts? Or was this just a split second of instinct, an awareness of death knocking at a doorstep? A surge of adrenalin shot up my spine. I froze, standing as still as a statue. I slowly lifted my arms, floating them up in the air like soft balloons, feeling his silence commanded it. But I refused to beg or grovel. “If you’re going to kill me, get it over with.” The response was a call of croaking frogs squawking over his every sound, deafening his every movement. I craned my neck aimlessly, and when I turned my head back around he stood directly in front of me, mud-caked and slathered in earth. Two paces away, he held a pistol aimed right between my eyes, finger taught on the trigger.

“You aren’t carrying anything are you, Isse?”

“You must think I’m pretty stupid,” I said. I slipped off my T-shirt, then my army trousers and threw them at him. He stepped on them, booting them down, trouncing them into the mud, but never taking his glare off me. His eyes shined like white bulbs under the cover of the forest, poking out at me under his mud-stained face. He spoke in a shaded tone. “I wasn’t sure you weren’t out on an ambush.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” he asked vaguely.

Both of us shut up for a moment. The tension in the air unfolded when a cool breeze blew through the trees. Finally he said, “Perhaps you think you’re still better than me going hand-to-hand.”

“I am.”

“I know,” he said, lips curving into a lopsided smile.

“But I fought you once. Look how that turned out.” He laughed a bit. “Come on then. I’ll show you something.”

He guided me through the jungle while trailing me three paces behind. We hiked out to a ravine with a pool-sized slab of sandstone dripping over a cliff. For a while, we sat in silence watching the crown of the sun creep beyond the tree line. Long shadows cast out over the river. I glanced over at Seee. He sat far away from me, but I could see his eyes raised at the stars twinkling through the blue-grey atmosphere.

“I call this place Second Sight Peak,” he said.

“A nice name.”

Staring at the crescent moon, he said, “We stare into the darkness every night, see the infinite, and grasp only a tiny iota of the idea of it, as no other species can. Yet few truly appreciate it.”

“I had a four-inch refractor growing up. We used to camp out on the hills and set it up and sometimes just gaze up there till dawn.”

“Is that a fact?”

“It is. My father pulled it out of a dumpster and gave it to me for my thirteenth birthday.”

“A nice gift,” he said. “Even if it was garbage.”

The last sweeps of sunlight dissipated and the singe of blue atmosphere rustled with the darkness. The cooing of an owl came in the distance. The wind shuddered and a breeze blew lightly across our faces.

“Look out there. Up on this ridge we’re standing on the
Panopticon of Nature.”

Was this coincidence? Had he listened in on the words I said to Pelletier? But if he knew, wouldn’t I be dead? My silence started to be revealing. To fill the space, I said, “It’s a beautiful view.”

“Up here we are real humans, aren’t we? Nature doesn’t care about us. At least the State and Nature have that in common, don’t they?”

Edging into the conversation he wanted to have, Seee gazed over at me. Pelletier’s code words I had spoken over the phone still rolled over in my mind, but I met his eyes and smiled. He looked up into the darkness at the stars once more. “Isn’t it ironic we can see objects twelve million light years away, understand and model them, tell if it is a quasar or a nebula, or even a binary star system—but never get there.”

“Red-shift, blue-shift,” I said. “The overwhelming story a spectrum of light can tell.”

He smiled faintly, as would one who suddenly finds common ground. “Some light reaching here has traveled longer than the dinosaurs’ entire existence. Time so large its meaning is vague, because it no longer refers to a realm we are able to grasp. Like infinity, it becomes warped, a limit of our comprehension.”

I picked up a pebble and fingered it. For a moment, it reminded me of The Hole. “If Voyager were going to Alpha Centauri, it would take another 40,000 years. We would need more than four hundred lives just to see it.”

“Not a lot of time in life is there?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Men like us don’t live forever. We breathe heavier than most, and the air is always thin even when its substance is thick.”

I wanted to say something, but he cut me off. “There is pain in being alive,” he continued. “Shouldering responsibility. Knowing you’ll send men to their deaths, good men, brothers. But traitors—traitors must be punished.”

“Traitors? What kind of traitors?”

“Traitors to our forefathers and country.” He sighed. “There is a point where the problem becomes too large, the atrophy too deep. A disease metastasizing. Ignoring it any longer is an unsustainable path. Cancer needs to be removed by the scalpel if the patient is to survive. I know you see this. You’ve been out on the street and seen the disease growing with your own eyes. Your father was a victim of it.”

“How so?”

“The real story is that your father had been laid off by the city. Tough times. More debt than revenue. He goes to find a job. He finds nothing. Unemployment runs out. He takes something—anything—flipping burgers at a BK. Except now the minimum-wage job won’t cover all of the expenses, the perpetual rising prices. For Christ’s sake, bread is eight dollars a pop now. Food stamps can’t cover the expense. And he doesn’t want the charity. So what do you do?” He paused for a second. “You revert back to instinct, to necessity. You crawl back in the jungle.”

He waited a moment, judging my reaction, then shook his head as if he had come to a conclusion. “You’re going to be the easiest one to turn.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, shocked at the boldness of the statement.

“Once you open your eyes and see that your father was a man not uncommon to most blue-collar men, you’ll have no choice. Your father was kicked out of a job because of the clampdown on State finances; a man who could no longer find a decent-paying job because of younger and older demographics squeezing him out of the labor force; a man who had enough pride in himself to want to keep supporting the family; a man who was beaten into doing what he did out of pure desperation. Your father was one man out of millions who are experiencing the same plight. If you open your eyes and ask yourself who is truly responsible for all of this, the people who have crippled the economy and are assfisting
the country with law after law to crush your liberty, you simply don’t have a choice. But you don’t see the big picture. You resist.”