The Fifth Sacred Thing (61 page)

“They say if you’re into it, the younger the better.”

“But what … why?”

“They’re little and delicate and beautiful, and you can do anything you want to them. Anything. And when you use one up, well, there’s another, just as little and cute and pretty coming up behind. I’m telling you, Madrone, they breed them. It’s an industry. With catalogs and videos and accessories. Instruments of torture.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“It’s true. And in revenge, the Angels steal kids, bust up houses, burn them down. Kill people. They probably take quite a bit of pleasure in doing it, too. I don’t like it, but I can’t blame them. You see, they’re ones who somehow got out. Grew up. God—or Goddess—only knows what happened to them. They don’t tell. They just stare at you with those blue marble eyes.”

Madrone sat silent for a moment, too shocked to speak. In Katy’s arms, Poppy murmured and wriggled.

“I wasn’t raised to believe in evil, Katy. But I can’t think of another word for this,” she said finally.

“There isn’t any other word for it. Where you come from—they don’t have sex shops and torture clubs?”

“No. Goddess, no! We have a fair amount of sex, privately. I certainly never lacked for it before I came down here. But it’s not—marketed. And that’s what I don’t understand: how can the Millennialists let this go on? They’re so anti-sex.”

“The Millennialists are the backbone of the industry. All that repression has to find its outlet somewhere. And remember, it’s not fornication if it’s done with the soulless—conveniently defined as anyone who isn’t a good enough Millennialist. Also, it helps if it turns a profit.”

The moon peaked over the edge of the canopy. Madrone gazed up. Here as at home,
la luna
was round and white, marked by the same shadows, changing in the same waxing and waning rhythms. Madrone somehow found that hard to believe. How could the same moon shine on such different worlds?

“There’s so much here I just don’t know about,” she said finally.

“You can ask me anything, Madrone. I want to help you all I can, because of what you’re bringing to us.”

“I don’t even know what to ask, because it’s so foreign to everything I expect. And I’m not really bringing that much, I’m afraid. Katy, I don’t really know what I can do here. Can I really teach these people anything that’s worth the effort and the danger of gathering here? Learning to be a healer takes years, and that’s with advantages you can’t even conceive of.”

“You’ve already achieved more than you realize.”

“What? If you’ve noticed anything, please tell me.”

“First of all, you’ve got the hillboys and the rats and the Angels all working together on something. That’s never happened before. Yeah, there’s some tension, but nobody’s pulling knives on each other. Generally, they’re as territorial as the other gangs. In fact, they’re not so different from the other gangs as they’d like to think. That’s really how this all started, you know—street gangs and hill gangs and a few key people with enough vision to mold it into something more.

“And that’s the other thing you’ve brought—the vision. Talk about the North, Madrone. Tell us about the streams and the fruit trees and how you organize your tree-planting brigades. Because we’ve got to know that things can be different, that they
are
different somewhere. That’s the only thing that really sets us apart from the street gangs—the vision. Well, the gangs are probably better armed. But you’re living, walking proof that this isn’t the only way things can ever be. All you have to do is walk into a room, and we can see by the set of your head on your shoulders and the way you move in your body that you come from somewhere else.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“You move like someone who’s never questioned her right to have a body. To exist, to breathe, to take up space. I’ve been watching you all night. It’s not arrogance, like the rich people. It’s not the hard, elegant gesture, like the Angels. It’s just—solid. Sure. As if you’d never learned to look down on anyone or bend to someone who looks down on you. Oh, I’m jealous. When I look at you, I feel so jealous I could cry, or hate you. But I don’t. I would like, just once in my life, to be in a place where everybody stood and moved and walked like you.”

“I don’t want to make people feel bad. It’s funny, I almost hate to talk about the North, even though I do, incessantly. It feels like bragging. Flaunting something people can’t have.”

“Brag about it. Flaunt it, tantalize us with it. Make us eat our hearts out. It’s so much better to be envious than hopeless.”

“And it makes me homesick,” Madrone said.

“You’ve made a great sacrifice to come here. Most of us in this fight simply had nothing to lose, but you did. And don’t think we don’t appreciate it, even if some smart-mouths act like assholes.”

“But I didn’t do it to be appreciated. I don’t want gratitude. I mean, that has nothing to do with why I came or what I’m doing here. It only gets in the way.”

“Why did you come down here? If I lived in a place where water flowed through the streets, I wouldn’t leave.”

Madrone laughed. “Maybe I just didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Maybe it’s our family curse. The Goddess picks on us, lays these visions
on us. Sends us off to do her dirty work. But what can you do? If you want to be true to your own power, you have to answer the call when it comes.”

“Are you sorry?”

“At every meal—or non-meal. But seriously, no, I’m not. What’s going on here is real. There’s no place to escape from it. Even back home, the battle’s on its way. So I don’t mind being on the front lines. But what about you? You seem different from a lot of the others. How did you get into this?”

“My dad and I moved down here after the Millennialists burned his church. He used to say that the poor were the ones who really needed him, anyway. That was back in ’32, when I was eleven, old enough to be a help to him. We started the gardens here, back before water got quite so hard to get. And he organized people. Actually, my dad stopped talking about God much after we came here. Mostly he talked about food and water. When I asked him about it, he’d just say that food and water were God to the poor.”

“Amen,” Madrone said.

“He died five years later, but I kept on. I couldn’t see joining the boys in the hills, running around with two rusty guns and calling yourself a revolution. I thought we had to begin to build something, to show people how things could be different. So here I am. And you? What is it about you we don’t know?”

“I’m tired,” Madrone said. “I’m tired and cranky and inside myself I whine all day long. I want to go home. I want to take a long hot bath and pick ripe tomatoes from the garden and sleep in my own bed with sheets. But I won’t go home now. I’m too angry and heartsick and stubborn to go home until we win something. Anything. And sometimes I wish I could kill and get pleasure out of it too. It seems such a simple solution.”

“I know.”

“Maybe Hijohn is right. Maybe it’s better just to burn it all down, even if we all burn with it.”

“That’s the temptation,” Katy said. “But is that how you won your revolution?”

“No. We did it the long, slow way. It took lifetimes to lay the groundwork for it. Some of the old ones spent their whole lives talking, organizing, trying one thing after another, never expecting to see real change. Some of them didn’t. The Uprising seemed to happen in an instant, but it was half a century in the making.”

“Well, there it is,” Katy said.

They sat for a moment, watching the silvery moonlight play on the gauze above their heads. She’s a remarkable woman, Madrone thought. In her presence I feel comforted.

“I’m glad I found you, Katy. I needed a friend here so bad. Just someone I can really talk to.”

“Me too.” Poppy was asleep, and Katy gently set her down. “Are you still hungry? I saved back a couple of corn crackers.”

“I could kill or die for one, Katy, if you’d only call it what it is: a
tortilla
, not a corn cracker.
¡Diosa!
It makes my mouth pucker.”

“Torteeya,” Katy said. “I know that. My mother spoke Spanish, but I didn’t learn much. And what I did know I had beat out of me when I was a kid, after the Millennialists got the Stewards to pass the Language Laws. It’s still hard to get the words off my tongue.”

“Well,” Madrone said, “if you want to make
una revolución
, you’re gonna have to remember how to roll your r’s.”

They shared tortillas and the scrapings from the pot of beans. Katy took the child and went back inside to sleep, but Madrone no longer felt her fatigue. She sat outside, on the doorstep, where the canopies did not quite reach and she could look up to a narrow patch of open sky. Stars glittered up there, out of reach. She wanted someone to hold her and rock her and tell her that everything was going to be okay, but no one was there. Mama? Johanna? Why do you haunt Maya and never come to me?

And then suddenly she was there, just a presence, like a vapor on the wind, something warm and dark and comforting and, at the same time, challenging.

Johanna, we are not going to win here, Madrone found herself whispering. We’re facing an enemy too ruthless. And if we can’t defeat them here, how can we defeat them at home?

Silence.

Johanna, I’m going to die down here. I’ll never lie in the mint in the Black Dragon garden or make love in the ritual room or bring Maya her morning tea and sit in the sun and talk again. I’ll never have a baby. And what’s worse, maybe, I’ll never see these streets transformed into the fields and gardens they could be, never see the streams running free from the hills down across these plains. Johanna, are you with me? Did you ever feel this hopelessness? Do you feel it now?

More silence. The dark intensified, congealed into an almost solid presence that yet remained black and silent. What do the dead have to say to those who grab with both hands at precarious life? Hold on. Let go.

22

M
aya had cooked Bird his favorite lunch, nachos and hot sauce and refried beans. He sat staring at them for a long time, while she hovered anxiously.

“You’ve got to eat,” she said.

“I know I should eat. The tension’s just getting to me, that’s all. The waiting. I almost wish they’d come, just to get it over with.” Dutifully, he scooped up a big wad of beans in a cheese-draped chip and raised it to his mouth.

They heard the door open below and a clattering of feet on the stairs. Rosa burst into the room.

“They’re here!” she cried. “They’re coming up the old freeway, over San Bruno Hill!”

Bird set the chip down, rose, and without a word walked out of the room. Maya heard him grab his jacket, heard the uneven cadence of his steps on the stairs. The door slammed.

He is terribly afraid, she told herself. That’s why he didn’t turn and say goodbye. Not because he doesn’t love me.

She sat there alone, staring at his empty chair and the plate of food he had barely touched. That was what hurt her, somehow, that he hadn’t had a chance to finish his food. Just a few short minutes ago, when she had been heating the beans and putting chips and cheese in the oven, he had been there, alive, free. She could have said anything she wanted to him. She could have touched his warm skin or stroked his hair.

I always tried to be so careful, she thought. I gave up caffeine when I was pregnant with his mother. I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol. And Brigid, when she was carrying him—she wouldn’t eat a thing they hadn’t grown themselves. Oh, she had spent years picking up rubber bands and thumbtacks and things that could choke a baby. They had installed catches in all the bottom cupboards to keep children out, and still to this day it was awkward to open the doors.

But you can’t keep them safe, she thought. Sooner or later they find a way to get themselves broken.

She turned and grabbed the handle of the cupboard and yanked it so hard that the safety catch snapped and broke. She banged it shut again and kicked it. Now I’m starting to cry, she thought. Well, good, that’s okay. Goddamn it, I have something to cry about.

Hours later, when Sam came in, she was sitting on the floor, sobbing, with the plastic safety catches she had ripped off the cupboard doors strewn all around her.