Dues of Mortality (32 page)

“
I’m
the one who should be sorry,” Max chimed in. “From the
looks of things, you have every right to be concerned.” He
paused, deliberately regarding Xavier then looked back at Glenda. “I
don’t know
you
,
okay, but I do know
him
.
If he says your innocent then that's the God's honest truth.”
Max reached into his desk drawer, and pulled out a code key that he
tossed over to Xavier. “I’ve got a trailer on the east
side that I was renting out. Last tenant moved out three weeks ago. I
had the utilities rolled over to me for purposes of showing it, so
the lights and water are on. It’s got an older Microsoft 800
hub, but it’s good to go. Any outgoing hits will be billed to
me.”

Xavier
was temporarily starstruck by the generosity. “Are you sure
about this, Max?” he asked. “I mean, if this all comes
down, I can’t guarantee you won’t...”

Max
just stopped him with another pish-posh wave. “Hello, grown man
making my own decisions here.”

Xavier
curled a cheek. “Right. Thank you.”

Glenda
turned away from the men, inhaling her palms. To her credit, she
hadn't yet dropped a single tear; but the effort was like tensing a
muscle and she didn’t want to break down in front of Xavier.
“Excuse me, where is your ladies room?” she asked Max.

Max
jabbed a finger in the air. “To the left. It’s the second
door in that small hallway we passed on the way in.”

Glenda
left quickly, with Xavier’s concern following.

“
You'll
forgive me for saying so, Zave, but this plan of yours sounds like
more than just a long shot,” Max said. “If you come up
dry on this mystery man of hers, you'll have only succeeded in being
fugitives even longer.”

“
I
know. I figure we'll have to turn ourselves in eventually; there's no
way around it.”

“
If
the local cops are the problem then why not the FBI, or the media?
Tell
them
your side of it.”

“
That
same media?” Xavier pointed an aggressive finger at the
webscreen. “They're already calling her a terrorist. And this
isn't a federal case; the FBI would just hand us over to the local
police with a big shiny bow. Besides, who in their right mind would
believe us? Even you're having a hard time with it; I can tell.”
Xavier took Max's silence as confirmation. “I have no idea what
the right thing is, Max, but I do know what I saw and she has every
right to be afraid of them. If there's even a chance she could be
right about this Kelmer guy then I have to stay with her.”

“
That's
a lot of passion for someone you just met.”

Xavier
dented his brow, reminded of the learned rapport he shared with Max.
During their years of military service, they’d killed, whored
and nearly died together more than once. You get to know someone
pretty well under those circumstances, almost without trying. Max
could pierce Xavier’s brain like a gamma knife and tell him if
he needed to see a priest or just take a good long shit.

“
Don't
give me that,” Xavier said.

“
What?”
Max retorted.

“
This
has nothing to do with that.”

Max
pursed his lips, looking as coy as a fox caught crawling under the
fence. “Don't know what you're talking about.”

Xavier
let it go. All his anxiety about old scabs and here
he
was pushing the issue.
Dumb-ass
.
He panned around the office.
“
So,
it looks like you’ve been doing all right,” he said. He
was suddenly feeling a tad confined and was desperate to change the
subject.

“
I
make a living. It keeps me healthy and the ex off my back. That is
when she’s not trying to strong arm more child support.”

Xavier
looked shocked. “You got a kid?”

Max
smiled. “Mhm. A little boy, see?” Max reached to his left
and grabbed a 3” x 5” picture frame, which had been
facing him, and spun it around. It was already scrolled to a
chubby-cheeked toddler with dimples to die for and ears like drink
coasters.

“
Handsome
boy,” Xavier remarked, almost dumbfounded. Why had it never
occurred to him that
good
things might be happening in
Max’s life? “Who’s his mom?”

“
Remember
Sheila Markham?”

Xavier's
face flattened out like dough under a rolling pin. “Get the
hell outta here,” he bellowed. He remembered Sheila Markham
alright. He remembered she was the reason vasectomies were invented.
That back-alley skank had had half the married men in Louisiana
paying her rent and cosigning her car loans. She also had a thing for
soldiers. And that spelled certain doom for Max, who, when it came to
women, was about as intuitive as a fart in a windstorm. The poor sap
never stood a chance against those thin ankles and $10,000 implants.
Once Sheila got a whiff of all that easily obtained devotion, Max's
bank account soon found itself getting cleared out like a bunker full
of Syrian rebels. Xavier had often tried to warn him that women were
capable of the kind of deceptions that would never even occur to a
man, and for reasons that defied rationality to its core. As if Max
would have listened. Xavier also never had the heart to tell Max that
Sheila had propositioned
him
more than once, even going so far as to place Xavier's hand under her
skirt, during a double date. She wasn't wearing any panties and she
wanted him to know it. Once Xavier got the hand back, he'd kept it
wrapped firmly around his beer bottle the rest of the night. Not that
there was any threat of betrayal on his part; he would have sooner
wandered into the men's room and steeped his dick in an unflushed
toilet.

“
There
I am, laid up in the hospital, with a hole where my knee used to be
and zonked out of my mind on Morphine,” Max said and pointed at
his left knee, “when she walks in and tells me she’s
pregnant. Felt like I’d been shot all over again.”

Xavier
shrank at the comment. Was Max reminding him on purpose?

“
Anyway,
after he was born and the DNA test came back, I was able to get a VA
insured refi and I opened up this place. It’s not where I
thought I’d be, but it’s doing pretty good.”

Xavier’s
stomach was in knots.
Damn it
,
he thought. Was Max actually trying to guilt-trip him? Or was hearing
the facts, exactly as they were, just that damned hard? He reinvested
his attention to the webscreen. And hoped, like hell, that Glenda
didn't have to all of a sudden lay a deuce.

The
news site had segued into replayed coverage of some loudmouth wonk of
a senator throwing a fit in front of the capitol building in
Washington D.C.. An impeccably dressed reporter in heavy makeup stood
at the base of the building where she introduced the soundbite, the
270 feet of its celebrated dome situated above her head like a hat.
At the midpoint of the capitol steps was a brooding, frumpy-looking
man with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing an old pair of horn-rimmed
glasses and a suit that looked like it had been slept in the night
before. He was addressing the crowd below while ardently
gesticulating with a fist full of papers.

“
It
is an absolute travesty,” he said spiritedly. “It is the
highest invasion of civil rights and the privileges of the American
people! Is there nothing left in America that is not for sale? Our
very genetic stock is being blatantly manipulated, bartered and
abused by this unfettered omnivorous industry, and if we do not take
steps to regulate them, they could unravel the very tapestry of human
existence. We should be asking ourselves, what will happen once
they’ve decided to usher in their new way of reshaping
humanity? To whom are we allowing access to the most sacred and
private areas of our lives? What is their agenda for the genetic
future of our country? If we fail to take measures right now, to stop
or at the very least control, this ubiquitous auctioning of our
life’s blood, we may very well one day find ourselves in a
world where anyone who does not fit some arbitrary genetic standard
is deemed unworthy to exist.”

“
Senator
Beaumont?” a reporter finally out-shouted his colleagues. “What
do you say to your critics who believe that this very type of
language fuels the fire for anti-biotech terrorism in the United
States? Don’t you think by using such incendiary language, that
you are indeed expressing a kind of round-the-way support for these
terrorists?”

Beaumont
looked ready for the question. “My entire campaign,
my
entire career
has always been about supporting laws that
preserve life and put the safety and security of
people
above all else!” he stated. “With the recent bombing and
murder of an innocent security guard at MIT, can anyone here say that
what these twisted sociopathic groups want is to preserve life? I
think not! If anything, these bombings only prove how too many
biotechs
make
themselves targets by not taking responsibility for the security and
environmental risk that they present to so many communities. And
t
hat's exactly what SB 39 is all
about. It ensures
that they are taking all precautions stated
by
law
, and not by
their bottom line.
And
that they’re not engaging in
any
illegal
or
unethical
genetic trading, tampering or manipulation.”

Xavier
shrugged and took a good long look at the image on the webscreen.
“Now
there’s
a guy who needs to get laid.”

For
some strange reason, Glenda was genuinely surprised to find that the
city of
Cleveland
had a
trailer park dotting the inside of its borders.
I
mean it's not like this was the boonies where they're planted every
other block,
she
thought
. In fact,
s
he'd always seen them as something you just happened upon as
you drove over an unknown stretch of road, and even then you might
not notice them, inside their matt-fenced, couple dozen acres, unless
someone pointed them out. She felt a tremendous weight lift from her
chest and sighed openly. She couldn't imagine a better place to get a
decent night’s rest than an invisible housing project.

Xavier
paid the cab driver, sans tip, and joined Glenda at the trailer's
doorstep. “Here we are,” he said. “I'd carry you
across the threshold, but I'm not as strong as I used to be.”

“
It's
okay. I'm not as
thin
as I used to be.”

Xavier
guffawed.
That was a load of
crap,
he
thought.
You're
perfect.
He knew Glenda was just reaching for an excuse to
gripe—and maybe fishing for a compliment—because that's
what women did when they wanted to feel better. Part of him even
wanted to give in to Glenda, wanted to tell her the truth: that she
could probably stop traffic without a spot of makeup and wearing a
body-cast. But there were a number of ways that could come off
sounding and not a one produced the type of results he could handle.

Once
inside the trailer, Xavier unloaded the bag of Take-and-Bake meals
he’d picked up on the way over, into its fridge. He'd also
bought a coloring kit for Glenda's hair and a pair of matching
prepaid comwatches. There was always the chance the trailer's hub
would have problems or that he and Glenda might be separated; though
Xavier had resigned that hell would freeze over before he would allow
the latter to happen. Glenda stood silent in the center of the
trailer, taking it all in. She had never been inside a mobile home
before and her only thought, now, was that it was everything she'd
imagined:
small and ugly
.
Anyone housed here longer than six months would have a one-way ticket
to claustrophobia and whatever the medical term was for fear of wood
paneling. Glenda peered down at the floor, truly wanting to barf. The
early-evening sunlight was pouring in through a window and
highlighted a huge stain on the carpet. She stared at the stain,
easily imagining its origins as everything from an overturned beer
keg to a dead body. From there, the only furniture in sight was a
coffee table turned on its side and a pair of metal chairs in the
kitchen area. The kitchen's space looked big enough to allow for two
people at once, but only if they held their breath while in it.
You're safe. That's all that
matters
, she thought and went about touring the rest of
their palatial estate while Xavier moved on to assaying the com-hub
stationed on the west wall of the living room. The hub was a
Microsoft 800 just like Max had said; built for the first municipal
WI-Fi that went up around fifteen years ago. With the older hubs the
connections had a tendency to drop every few minutes if you stayed on
too long or tried to make too many simultaneous connections, but it
would more than suit the purpose at hand.

“
So
who gets the bed?” Glenda asked, emerging from the hallway
after her reconnoiter of the trailer.