So lovely, the goosefleshed girls in suits gone flabby, the girls with lips rimmed in blue. Queen of all is Helle. She has been away with Astrid since winter began, returning a week ago to dazzle. She sits, bone white, on the boulder by the edge of the Pond. She is dreadlocked, nose-studded, her elbows puckered with cold. She is so pale Bit can hardly look at her.
The Pond roars with voices; it hurts Bit’s ears. An early day in May, and freezing, but the kidlets and Ados of Arcadia have come here to soak up the chill sun. What had once seemed to Bit an impossible stretch of water has shrunk with two hundred thrashing bodies in it. He swims to the center of the Pond and goes under. The boys whiten the surface; the girls’ feet dangle off the boulders, small, skimming things. He goes deeper, to the bottom, where the young weeds are nubbins under his feet and the cold clutches at him.
There is peace in this deep. He is free from the layered tensions of Arcadia, the overcrowding, the hunger. But up where the surface meets the sky, a speck becomes an open hand, becomes a star slowly falling toward him. A pulse in his gut when he sees that it is Helle, her eyes open to search for him. Her feet, landing, send shivers of mud to his knees. She reaches toward Bit, touches his side. Bad Helle, she tickles him.
He has to race the silvery swim of his lost air to the surface. There, he gasps and chokes, tears starting to his eyes. Helle comes up, laughing. Her dreadlocks float around her head, weeds themselves.
You’re avoiding me, Bit, she says, her mouth half underwater.
No, he says but can’t look her full in the face. He isn’t avoiding her; he just can’t see the old Helle under the new gloss and glamour of the Outside in her.
She says, no longer laughing, Look at me. It’s just
me,
Bit.
The other girls are swimming toward them, their heads like a flock of pale ducks over the water. Before they reach Helle, he does look at her. For this one moment, he sees the old Helle, that vulnerable girl more lost, more watchful than even he had been.
At last, the kidlets have turned blue and fled, and only the toughest remain, twelve adolescents—Ados—every one of them Old Arcadia. His best friends shiver in the drizzle next to Bit. Ike, lanky and shining with the same white light as his sister; Cole and Dyllie, with Sweetie’s beautiful face, in shades of pink and brown. They sit together, feigning ease, listening to Helle, who was never known for grand storytelling, fill them in about the Outside:
Everyone’s fat and smells like chemicals. They wear stupid buttons all over their jackets and all they talk about is the World’s Fair.
All at once, it seems, his friends are straining to listen. Then he hears, too, and knows that he has been hearing the beat for some time, under the birds, under the wind, under the leaves moving in the trees. Helicopters. Bursting over the treetops, glossy black and taloned, flying low. Bit can see the pilots in earmuffs and the grim men in the doors holding machine guns.
The wind from the blades tosses water in their eyes, sends rocks against their skin. The choppers pass, and the Pond sloshes against the shore. Bit leaps up and races his friends toward Arcadia House, easily outstripping the rest over the mud paths worn into the lawn, though Cole, too, is fast. People clump in the doorways of the Soy Dairy, the Bakery, the Eatery; heads mushroom from the windows and shyly withdraw. A herd of Trippies scatters, leaving their Minders behind. People pour around the Terraces, massing in the circular drive, and Bit hurtles through the sunburnt bodies, pitchforks and shovels, mudded feet and bodily stink and screaming kidlets, the babies wailing from their slings, practically the whole crowded nine hundred Arcadians having left their scattered pursuits to gather here. Bit scans, panicking, for Hannah. When he finds her—hair in twinned crowns around her head, plumper now because of the pills, frowning up at the sky—he is washed with relief. Her apron is smeared with soy; he takes her hand and puts himself between her and the machines. But she is shouting
Abe
in his ear, and here it is again, the sharp stone in Bit, his guilt; Abe always an afterthought. Bit scans until he sees his father in his wheelchair, on the Arcadia House porch. The thin pale legs in the shorts, the streaky beard. Abe is trapped up on the rain-slick hill. Without Hannah, he would have stayed there. Bit sprints up the Terraces. His father pats his shoulder, says, Good boy, steer me down.
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.
No violence, Hannah says.
There is a shuffling in the hallway, and they stop to listen until whoever it is moves on. Honey, Bit, I can’t force you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with, she whispers. If you say no, I’ll get out there as fast as I can, but I don’t know the secret paths through the woods like you. You’re so fast and quiet. But you have to know about the consequences of getting involved. We could go to jail or get shamed out of Arcadia if we’re caught. It’s your choice. We’ll always love you, no matter what you decide. We respect what your conscience tells you to do.
Her voice, though: the tightness in it. It just kills him. All right, he says.
Abe exhales. All right, he says. It’s the little island in the stream north of Verda’s. She knows all about the Pot Plot, she sympathizes. Go as fast as you can off the path, and when Hannah can hike out there, she’ll take over the watch from you. Ready?
Bit thinks, No.
He says, Ready.
Run, Abe says.
Bit runs. The smoke of the bonfire in the Sheep’s Meadow is already strong. They must have pulled up a patch already. He is beyond the tents that have spread in the past year into the woods, for the people who can’t find cots in the separate encampments; he is beyond the smell of the fields, the loos, the compost heaps. He can hear people crashing through the forest, clumsy ogres. Bit knows the deer paths. He goes, invisibly, beyond where they are. Past the noise, the old watchful silence of the woods presses in on him: he settles into his legs and lets the trees whip by. He startles a crane from a pool, sends the white tails of deer bounding over logs. Miles later he slows and sees the island turtling out of the stream. Only when he has waded through the hip-deep water and has come a few steps in does he see the plot, cleverly hidden on the eastern side of the trees. The helicopters, Hannah had known, would come from the navy base in the west or the army base to the south.