Running all the way from the hole in the fence at Sunflower to this place, I thought I’d cough up my lungs. They are still sputtering. I fish around in the backpack for the pump and take two more quick puffs and peer out. The temperature has dropped suddenly, and the wind has picked up. Evening is approaching. I wonder if we shouldn’t take our chances, leave our hiding spot, and make a run for the forest.
We wait, and wait, until Adam announces he can’t hold it anymore. I stick my head out to check whether the coast is clear. From this distance, the camp is barely visible. It looks nothing like the rampart I took
it to be. Nearby is a dense patch of ragweed. I tell Adam to crawl to it and find a spot behind it to relieve himself. He does as instructed. Even being separated by a distance of ten feet makes my heart pound. I call out to him, and the ragweed rustles back in reply. I keep a watchful eye until Adam calls for me to look at the sky.
“Get down.”
He ignores me, keeps his face turned to the west. In the last light, he is like a filament, bright gold.
“Get back in here.”
“Nobody’s coming,” he says. “Come out; you’ve got to see this.”
I wriggle out and stand up. I arch my back and shake off my stiff legs.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” he exclaims.
I catch my breath. Sundown on the prairie. Either this has become more spectacular in my seventeen-year absence, or I must have walked around half-asleep before. The sun looks like a single piece of confetti against a scarlet sky. Streaks of orange and gold are unrolled across it like streamers. If you’d never seen a sunset before, it would be easy to imagine this a once-in-a-lifetime event.
I tug on Adam’s sleeve. “We should get back under that cover. It’ll do this again tomorrow.”
He is a very old shaman, some holy man on a mountaintop, when he says, “But, it is happening now,” so we stay where we are. A perfect sky is mirrored in the nearby lake. On its dark surface, the lacy clouds look like doilies. There is a ravaged field beside the lake, but everywhere else the land is a thick green pelt. A bellow from the thicket startles a flock of birds into a waving flag. Cawing, trilling, tweeting—all of nature is engaged in some call-and-response, some primal litany. Adam watches the spectacle, and I watch him.
“They wanted me to be some lady’s boyfriend,” he says after a while. He says it as though he’d been asked to eat worms. “They said I was to love her. I didn’t have to love her for very long, they said. I think they wanted me to, you know . . .”
One night when Adam was about three or four, he woke up from a
bad dream, crawled over to my cot for comfort, and found Dobbs, rigid, on top of me. He tugged Dobbs’s arm, insisting he get off. “You’re hurting my mommy!” Instead of pushing Dobbs aside and taking Adam in my arms, I told him to do as Mister said and go back to bed. I can’t imagine Adam having anything but the same disgust for sex that I do. I hope that’ll change for him one day.
“Don’t think about it anymore, Adam. We’re not going back there.”
We watch the confetti-sun make landfall. A squawking flock of birds drops out of the sky and settles on the remains of an old barbed-wire fence. They peck at one another, jostling for more room. One voices its displeasure when it is knocked off its perch; a devious cackle rings out among the others. Adam finds this funny, too.
“What kind of birds are they?”
“Seagulls,” I answer, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world for seabirds to be nesting in the middle of Kansas.
Adam spots Marcus before I do. Hurrying toward us with a shopping cart, he is panting. Droplets of sweat roll off his forehead. He lifts a bundle out of the front seat. “She’s hungry.”
Amid the jumble of rags is a tiny face. A pert nose and a broad forehead and two dark, tear-filled eyes form the very picture of vexation. She opens her tiny mouth and belts out a full-throated yell.
“You’re going to have to wait a bit longer, little lady,” he tells the crying infant, while Adam and I both stand, stunned.
The cardboard box in the back contains a second bundle of rags, which I confirm is another baby.
“Careful not to wake that one; I only just got her to sleep.” Marcus holds out his little finger to the baby in his arms, and the tiny mouth latches on to it. “This trick won’t last long.”
Adam has not moved. He’s staring at the baby. Spellbound.
“What? You want to hold her?”
Marcus extends his arms to Adam. I am sure my son is going to shake his head. Adam’s eyes flick from the bundle to Marcus’s face. A look of uncertainty grows into a small smile, and he accepts the package.
“You mind she don’t boss you around now.”
“She’s so light.” Adam speaks softly, as though any louder, his words might injure her.
Adam touches her tiny fingers. He studies her fingernails. He runs the tip of his finger across her arm. He glances at me to see if I, too, am witnessing this miracle. “Her head is so soft.” She startles him by squirming a little, and he clutches her close like he’s afraid of dropping her. “Why is she so small? Is there something wrong with her?”
All Adam knows of children is Charlie’s bones. “You were this small once.”
Adam presses the tip of his finger into the baby’s palm, and her fingers close around it. They search each other’s eyes and seem to make one another’s acquaintance on some other plane.
“Whose babies are these?”
Marcus sidesteps my question and instructs me to gather our belongings. We must hurry, he says. He straps the second child to his back with a towel. It is obviously not the first time he’s done this. He pushes the cart into the greenbrier. “With a bit of luck, we can get to Ginny’s in time for grub.” I take this to be code for, “We must try to outrun them.” He offers to take the little girl from Adam, but Adam won’t give her up, so Marcus hustles toward the nearby copse, beckoning for us to follow.
I bring up the rear, all the time watching my son and his cargo. Moments ago, he’d been quick to dismiss the idea of love, and here he is, smitten. Without having to be told, he supports the baby’s head in the crook of his elbow and keeps her against his chest. As soon as her lips start to quiver, he offers her his little finger. Adam beams when she sucks it. He keeps a beady eye on the path, but every so often bends to her with an encouraging word. “Hold on, baby girl.” “We’re going to get you some food real soon.” “Who’s a clever girl?”
“She likes you.”
“You think so?” he asks, clearly pleased.
We continue weaving our way quickly through the scrappy, juvenile trees until we reach a jungle with nooses for vines and ground cover
spiny enough to be barbed wire. Adam is careful to step over every tree root and around every rock. I trip enough times that Marcus offers to assist me.
“They’ll know you helped us escape.”
Marcus doesn’t understand that this is my apology for landing him in deep trouble, too. Instead, he assures me Sunflower doesn’t know where he lives or what paths he takes. We are headed to a safe house, he adds, and he’s taking us the long way because they won’t be able to drive the ATVs through woods this dense. They’ll have to pursue us on foot. No use in stating the obvious, that we won’t be able to outrun them if they come this way. Instead, I change the subject. “They wanted Adam for breeding purposes.”
“Everyone’s trying to forget Diablo, but they keep getting reminded all over again when them babies don’t come out right. Soon as the Confederacy can show folks a perfect baby, the sooner we can put the past behind us, is what they think. You have no idea what people are willing to put up with for the possibility of a perfect kid.”
“The booklet didn’t say what the Confederacy is.”
Marcus explains about an alliance between separate, loosely governed bands of people. First formed to keep disputes between neighboring camps and villages from mushrooming into wars and later to form a united front against the free-range bandits, it now mostly exists to promote trade. Overseeing the Confederacy is the Grand Council, its members former politicians from Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Fidel Castro’s second cousin sits in the big chair, Marcus says. The funding of places like Sunflower is his brainchild.
I look over my shoulder. Adam is singing the baby a lullaby. Lyrics about rolling rivers, mandolin players, and men home from the war. Singing so tenderly you’d think he has firsthand experience of such things. The last of the sunlight falls between the leaves, wafting down on him like Communion wafers. A Baltimore oriole chants. In the air is the faint smell of skunk. For just a moment, it is not the scary woods, but the Garden of Eden.
“These babies are, what, a month old?”
“Three weeks,” Marcus tells me. “Most of them that make it to term die the first week.”
It makes no sense what he says—unviable fetuses, late-term abortions on those that test positive for defects, infanticide in those cases where defects go undetected until birth. Very few are spared, he remarks.
“And these two?”
Marcus explains the arrangement he has with Sunflower. Rather than euthanizing all the defective newborns, they have agreed to let Marcus take those with the highest chance of survival. It’s not policy but rather a case of officials turning a blind eye.
Fortunately, Adam doesn’t hear any of this. “They don’t look defective to me,” I insist. I am about to ask Marcus where he takes the babies, but he silences me with his hand and comes to an abrupt halt. He motions for Adam to be quiet, for us not to move. He cocks his head. I can’t hear anything but the ringing of cicadas, the rapid clicks of crickets, the harsh singsong tone of katydids—it’s the sound of the daytime and nighttime critters changing guard.
“Is it them?”
“Ssh.”
After a while, he bids us move. We walk no more than ten paces farther when he stops us again.
Very quietly, he announces, “We’re being followed.”
I swing around and can’t be sure if several heads have just darted behind the spindly eucalyptus trees or if it is the trickery of fading light and shimmering leaves.
Marcus crouches. Adam and I do the same. Marcus makes some flicking motion with two fingers. I don’t know if he intends for us to head to the nearest tree for protection or to run like hell.
Adam creeps up next to me. “What is it, Mom?” He looks terrified, not just for himself now, but for his ward, too.
“Deer, probably,” I tell him, because this is better than saying, “Them.” I show him the same signal Marcus flashed me.
Instead of running, Adam stands up and points at what Marcus has chased out from behind a bush. “Is that a hog?”
Marcus throws a stone at it, and the mutt scampers away. “Got separated from its pack most likely. It’ll get picked off by a bear or a mountain lion soon enough.”
There isn’t a mountain for a thousand miles. I pick up the suitcase and take off after Marcus again. “Mountain lions? In Douglas County?”
“A lot of game in these parts.” Marcus gives a rundown of what a diminished human population has done for wildlife.
I look behind me to see what Adam makes of all of this, and he is lagging behind. At first glance, it appears as though he’s taking a breather, but then I notice he has one hand extended. A few yards behind him is the cowering dog trying to settle an age-old dilemma of whether to risk its neck for the sake of a morsel.
“Adam! Get away from that animal!”
A stone goes whizzing by my head and finds its intended target. The dog yelps and falls back.
“What’d you do that for?” Adam straightens up with the baby and glares at Marcus.
“You give it something to eat, and it’s going to be a menace the rest of the trip.”
“It’s probably got rabies,” I add.
I know exactly what Adam is thinking. He is remembering an old conversation and now aims to cash in on the promise he’d extracted at the end of it.
“No,” I insist.
“You said.”
I clarify what I meant—a pet, not a cross between a pit bull and a coyote. Besides, what kind of dog doesn’t have hair?
“You said I could choose, and I choose this one.”
We argue back and forth until Marcus insists we get a move on.
“I’m not going.”
“Adam . . .”
“You can’t make me.”
“Son, your mother’s right. You don’t know where this stray comes
from. Trust me, there are hundreds of dogs running around. You’ll have so many to pick from, it’ll make your head spin.”
While we are trying to talk some sense into him, he claps his hand against his thigh and the stupid mutt advances another two feet.
“He’s limping!” Adam notes.
Oh, dear God. “Injured animals bite, Adam. Just leave him be.”
The standoff lasts until Marcus strikes a bargain. “Let’s just keep walking. Don’t feed him. If he wants you for a friend, he’s going to have to walk on that foot a good way yet.”
Adam brightens.
Marcus leans over to me and whispers, “Trust me, the dog will tire of this in a few minutes.”
Having settled in the recesses of the forest, nightfall now edges toward us. We try to outpace it. Only once do I need to stop and use the inhaler. The rest of the time, I keep up with Marcus and try to ignore the fact that Adam has already named the dog Oracle and is giving it all sorts of commands, not least of which is, “Come.”
My eyes have adjusted to the dark, but my nerves have not. When Marcus leads us out of the woods, there is just enough light to make out the contours of the land, land that could easily be traversed by vehicles. I scan the hill, waiting for the beam of a headlight to skim it.
“Mom!”
I swing around, thinking Adam has dropped the baby or been bitten by the dog, but he is staring up at the sky. Swirls of bright green flick across the heavens, rolling into a curlicue, then falling like a curtain. The lights move so fast I get dizzy and reach out for Marcus’s arm to steady myself.
“Aurora borealis,” Marcus replies when Adam asks if they are angels. “Don’t see this nearly as much as we used to.”