Goodhouse (24 page)

I began to hum the song that I'd heard the night we'd worked late in the soybean field—the melody with a bright, catchy chorus that slipped, unexpectedly, into a minor key. I let the sound calm me, infect me with its beauty, with its swaying refrain, but even this was complicated. My voice was not my own—my affinity for music was a gift from the school, a useless gift, now a redundancy to be phased out. I'd been taught to love something that had no future.

I didn't realize Owen was awake until I went silent and he told me to keep going. “I like that song,” he said.

So I kept humming. I started to make up words—nonsense phrases that grew increasingly incoherent as I drifted closer to sleep. Owen sucked on his inhaler, and then, just as I was fading, I felt a sudden pressure on the mattress as he lay down beside me, facing away, back-to-back. I was suddenly awake.

“What's wrong?” I said.

“I got a letter from the College of Art,” he whispered.

“And?” I said.

He was quiet for a long time, but I felt the tension in his muscles and heard the uncomfortable rasp of his breath. “That man who interviewed me,” he said, “on our Community Day—I don't know that he was real.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Of course he was real.”

“I had to do things,” Owen said. “At his house.” From the thin, reticent tenor of his voice I knew that he was trying not to give life to a memory.

“What things?” I said.

“Not related to art,” Owen said. I began to roll over and sit up. “Don't,” he said. “Don't move.” I lay back down. “I don't want you to say anything.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Not even that,” he said.

There was barely enough room for the two of us on the mattress, but I made myself lie still. After a while I felt him relax into sleep, only to startle awake when he couldn't draw an easy breath. I wondered if it would be like Owen said—we'd get work detail one night and then we'd be outnumbered.

“Still awake?” I whispered.

I heard him suck on the inhaler. Eventually, he got up and returned to his own bed.

“Thank you,” he said. “For today. Whatever happens, I won't forget.”

*   *   *

The next morning, we stuffed a bunch of drawing paper into the trash can to hide the scorch marks. Owen and I checked and rechecked our personal pages, but there were no penalties posted yet—just silence—and this was even more worrisome.

Blake came by our room to collect some of the trash from the night before. Someone had left two reeking sacks of apple mash, and there were bits of charred paper stuck to the linoleum. Blake looked hungover. His eyes were watering, and every time he bent over to collect something, he stood up with a groan.

“They'll do room searches today,” he said, “so make sure to flush everything. Wipe the floors, too.” They looked dirtier than they should've been.

We had an escort to breakfast, and for the rest of the day they didn't let us travel independently. We moved in small groups of about twenty, accompanied by six proctors. Owen was taken to work on the mural and I ate alone. I felt other students watching me, palming at my approach. By now everyone had heard about the breakout and the fight. I didn't have any visible bruises or lacerations, something that would be unremarkable at La Pine but was considered extraordinary given what had happened on the field yesterday. I tried to move as if I couldn't feel the wound adhesive puckering the skin of my back.

I had a history class later that morning. It was to be my last one, though I didn't know it at the time. The teacher never arrived, so we watched a video documentary of the United States Revolutionary War. It was called
Johnny Tremain
. It looked old—a copy of a copy—and the beginning had corrupted data, so I never did figure out if it was real or just a story. Afterward, there was still a half hour to fill and we sat quietly at our desks. The classroom had a protected podium where a teacher usually stood to lecture or run the media. It had half-walls made of Plexiglas and a desk with a light strip that usually threw ominous shadows across the teacher's face. But today it just lit the emptiness—and so we all sat in the dim room, staring at a glowing tower.

Outside, I watched a group of proctors leading students across campus. They made a loose perimeter around the boys, each man clutching a handheld. The men were looking at the sky. The proctors who'd taken us to breakfast had been like that, too. And then I knew, whatever had happened yesterday, whatever they weren't telling us, the attack had come from above. I stared up at the thin white ribbons of cloud, at the ring of deeper blue at the edge of the horizon. It was vast and ungoverned. With the fence in the distance and the guardhouses, too, the sky suddenly made me feel like I was in a box—a box without a lid.

At noon I was escorted to the factory with the other 3s and 4s. Gravel was still mounded in the fields. A bulldozer—a yellow, square-bodied thing with a long, clawed trunk—tore at the remnants of the hound house. Another truck with a wide loader was on hand to lift the debris and place it in a Dumpster. I kept looking over my shoulder for Davis, for anyone in a class leader uniform. They were conspicuously absent.

When I got to the factory, I was told to report to my supervisor's office. The rest of the group descended the stairs to the suiting-up room, but I trudged to the third floor. I could see Tim's office at the end of the hallway, but to get there I had to pass the large windows that overlooked the distribution center where the Mule Creek inmates worked. I saw them in their jumpsuits, stacking boxes and loading pallets. I ducked below the edge of the window and shuffled forward, hunched over, too tall to really pull it off, but still trying to stay as low as I could.

“What are you doing?” Tim said. He stood in the doorway to his office.

“Nothing,” I said. I had my back to the window. “I dropped something.”

He glanced at the floor. “Well, pick it up.”

“I thought I lost a button.” I ran my hand over my shirt. “Guess not.”

Tim just watched me, his gaze narrowing as if trying to discern my true purpose. “You got a medical classification,” he said. “You're out of the mixing rooms today. Go suit up and relieve Quality Control.”

I shook my head. “That's a mistake,” I said. “I feel fine. I can lift the bags.”

“I'm not asking a favor,” Tim said. He walked over to me, standing so close that I could smell the sour, musty odor of his unwashed uniform. When he spoke again, his voice was low but commanding. “Or do you want to test me?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you will,” he said, “report immediately to your work assignment.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Tim held a bottle in his damaged hand, some civilian drink with a colorful label. He lifted it to take a sip. I was waiting for him to step back, but he stayed where he was, enjoying my discomfort.

“I might not be able to read your file,” he said, “but I don't need to. You're all the same.” He nodded. “Consistently disobedient.”

“Sorry, sir,” I said.

“Tell me,” he said, “what do you want to do when you graduate?” But his mocking tone let me know that the question was rhetorical. I lowered my gaze, stared at my shoes. “Do you want to work here?” he asked. “Maybe you want my job? Would you like that?” He lifted the bottle and made a show of inspecting the label. “Or do you think it's not important enough,” he said, “that
I'm
not important?”

“I just want to work,” I said. I was hoping that this was the right answer, the proper amount of submission.

“Work is a privilege,” he said. “You forget that. Year after year we have the same boys forgetting the same things. Can you imagine how frustrating that is?”

I nodded, and Tim put the bottle on the windowsill, setting it down a little more heavily than was necessary. The sound made me jump. “No, I don't think so,” he said. “I really don't think you can imagine.”

*   *   *

I reported to the suiting-up room and was disappointed to find it crowded with a different shift—dozens of boys peeling off their coveralls and hairnets. I passed the wallscreen where I'd talked with Bethany and wondered if she could see me now, some electronic pulse on a screen.

I grabbed a set of coveralls from the
CLEAN
bin. I had just pulled them on when a lanky kid with brown hair swatted me on the back, right across my wound. I spun to confront him, but he gave me a big grin and said, “That's cojones, man.” It took me a moment to realize he was referring to the fight.

“Or stupid,” his friend mumbled.

“That's cojones,” the kid repeated. “But I wouldn't want to be you.”

I trudged over to Quality Control. Once I was on the factory floor, the intensity of sound dulled thought. I tapped the previous boy on the shoulder, replacing him, sitting on the tall metal stool and watching the chocolate carpet creep past. White ribbons of frosting spooled out so that the whole thing looked vaguely like a divided roadway, white lines on dark asphalt.

I positioned myself so that I could see more of the room, specifically the ladder in the corner. At one point, I felt a prickling at the back of my neck and the hair on my arms stood up as if there were lightning in the air. I whipped around, searching for movement. Nobody was there. I told myself I was overreacting, but still, I removed my earplugs. Several hours into my shift, after a batch had run and the conveyor belt was empty, I got up to pace. It was only luck that I happened to glance at the exit door. A long iron pipe was wedged through the loop of the handle and jammed behind a similar pipe that ran close to the wall.

I pulled on the pipe, but it didn't move. I swiveled to face the room. It was empty. I stared into the shadows around the grain silos. A loud horn signaled that the line was about to resume. And that's when I saw Montero. He was standing beside the tray where I'd put the rejected cupcakes, eating one, chewing thoughtfully as he watched me.

“You missed your deadline,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I noticed that the main camera—the one that monitored and recorded the Quality Control environment—had been disabled. Montero had stuck something to the lens. It looked like a metal cone. I pointed toward it. “That's a mistake,” I said. “They'll send a proctor.”

“Let them,” he said. “This won't take long.”

“They'll lock down the factory,” I said.

“Not before we send you a message,” he said. He reached over and I thought he was going to pick up another cupcake, but he lifted a knife instead—a compact, improvised-looking blade that fit easily in his hand. “Or should we give you one more day?”

“Who's we?” I said.

Montero nodded over my shoulder. A man stood just a few feet behind me. He was gigantic—easily six and a half feet tall—the right size and shape to force that pipe into place. I began to edge away. He didn't look like anyone I'd ever seen. Black tattoos covered his cheeks and forehead—some kind of swirling pattern that sprawled onto his neck, disappearing into the collar of his too-small Mule Creek jumpsuit.

“I have your reader,” I said, “but not on me. It's in my room, in the mattress. I didn't know I'd be working here today.”

“He's lying,” the giant said.

“Look,” I said, glancing between the two of them. “It's not that easy to move stuff around campus.” I was just stalling, saying anything. This was my own fault, and I was furious with myself. I should have reported Montero, but I'd been too eager to possess something, to have contraband in my pocket. I'd been greedy, and now it would cost me.

“I think we need to do some clarification,” the giant said. He started toward me. “We need to talk to James in a way that he can understand.”

“Great,” I said. I nearly tripped over the stool where I'd sat these past few hours. It was old—the paint was scratched and one of the legs had a serious dent—but it was made of a thick, sturdy metal. I reached down and picked it up, holding it in front of me like a shield.

“Stay back,” I said. “I'm warning you.”

But they were both converging now. I turned and threw the stool into the works of the cooling tube.

Montero lunged, but he wasn't fast enough to grab it. The legs were sucked in, and then suddenly the stool wrenched upward as if it had caught in an internal gear. There was a massive booming sound and I heard the ping of metal striking the wall behind me. The giant screamed, staggered to one side, his hand on his shoulder, a piece of metal lodged in the meat of his arm. The line stopped. Smoke puffed from the machinery. Cupcakes continued to churn out of the hot-icer, cascading onto the floor, until the belt shuddered and snapped and flung them everywhere. There was an eerie groaning noise somewhere deep along the line. We all were momentarily stunned by the extent of the damage.

“You stupid fuck,” Montero said.

“You better run,” I said. Someone was already banging on the jammed exit door, trying to open it. “Cupcake?” I offered.

The camera swiveled overhead, or it tried to. It had been damaged by a projectile when the cooling tube ruptured. Whoever was at the door shouted, “Open this right now.”

“Get me out of here,” I shouted back. “It's jammed.”

The giant grabbed the front of my shirt. He threw me onto the ground. The wound on my back reopened. “Don't touch me,” I said. I tried to scramble away from him, but I slipped on the greasy floor. His touch had infected me with a kind of toxic animosity. It lit me up inside, made me stupid with fury.

I was braced for a fight, but it didn't come. The pounding on the door was replaced by a sawing sound, and—at this—the two prisoners scrambled up the side of the grain silo. I ran to the door. The pipe had loosened, but by the time I yanked it out, I was alone in the room. The doors surged open. A half-dozen proctors streamed in. “They're up there,” I said. “I know their names. Well, I know one of them. They're ten seconds ahead of you.”