Swarm (11 page)

“Granny told me about fairies,” Shannon said suddenly, surprising me. When I turned, her eyes darted up to meet mine. “Little fucking thieves.” She held my gaze and I stared back at her, a twitch flickering around her scowling lips. Did she mean you? It seemed you needed protection from everyone except me. I waited for more. None came. Shannon groaned and stretched out on the couch, turning toward the back cushions. In the corner of my eye, the boys moved and I saw where they were, crouched in the garden, down the long rows of corn, weeding.

Relieved, I left that house. Worried that they'd caught you, I walked home fast. In my mind I saw Mr. Bobiwash, waiting on the wharf for the doctor, a duck held out in offering, its bloody feathers gleaming green-gold, Marvin by his side.

At first I
was a thief. The three of us were: Walter, Margo, and me.

It was dark out when Margo woke me. I groaned, snapped the light on. It didn't illuminate.

“What time is it?”

“After five,” she said. “He'll be here soon.”

She shut the door before I could answer, and I think that was because she knew I was having doubts. I lay there, watching the slow crawl of dawn through the corners of my room: across the poster of a mermaid stretched out on a seaweed-draped rock, the plywood shelf on steel brackets my dad put up when they'd visited in the fall that one and only time. They slept on the futon in our living room. My father had dropped the shiny hooks of his depression throughout the visit and I'd refused to be snagged. When they left, he gripped my upper arm and asked me to come home and all I could do was turn cold—a technique I sometimes try with Marvin, although he is not needy, only indifferent.

“Hurry up,” Margo called through my door, and I had no choice but to drag myself out of bed. As I pulled on my jeans, I wondered where Marvin was, if I'd see him that day, what was happening down at the soup kitchen. Those prescribed duties had been a relief—do this, do that, do this. Like a job.

Walter was late. By the time he arrived—bumping onto the sidewalk in a borrowed red car, one tire nearly flat, the radio antenna snapped off at the base—we'd lost the advantage of darkness. Margo flipped the front seat up so I could climb in and Walter grunted at me, a sound that could have been hello. His odour was strong, like a weird spice.

We drove for twenty minutes or so, headed north, the city shifting from tightly packed downtown houses to industrial parks to a sprawl of huge homes, lined up like a planted pine forest. A pillar of smoke stood in the distance where somebody was burning garbage or a building had been set on fire. Over the years, the suburbs had pretty much emptied out. Families had walked away from their 3D
TV
s and cheap composite furniture. But Walter said we weren't there for that stuff. We would strip out the central arteries, the copper wiring and pipe. “There are still shops that'll pay,” he told me. “Cash or trade, canned food, clothes, bits of silver and gold. There aren't a lot of places left, but if you dig around you can find them.” He nodded as he talked, moving his whole upper body. I wondered if he was high. “A buddy of mine does this in New York,” he said, his eyes flicking over my face in the rear-view. “He's got a unit too. A team. You should see if Marvin's interested.”

I said nothing. Margo knocked her cigarette against the ridge of the open window.

It was fully daylight by the time we entered the subdivision's winding streets. Walter slowed to the speed of a restless pace. My stomach growled into the quiet and he hooked a plastic bag on to his claw and swung it back to me. I pulled out a strip of jerky. The meat was spicy and warm.

We pulled into the driveway of a house with yellow grass poking through the dirty snow. Inside, the walls had already been sliced open, wiring and piping removed. Walter climbed under the kitchen sink and quickly slid out again. “Fucking plastic.” His hand on the floor made a clattering sound.

At first the plan was to go back into the city and find an older house, but when we went outside, Walter's gaze swung left. In the neighbour's front yard, a toppled real estate sign was half covered by a fading pink sticker that read,
REDUCED!

“Is this safe?” I murmured to Margo as Walter slipped a folded strip of aluminum cut from a soda can into the lock and opened the side door. A baby cried somewhere close by.

The house was still furnished. Two glasses stained with the red powder of dried-out wine stood on the granite countertop. A bowl half full of yellowed milk sludge and mouldy cereal Os sat on the table. I wondered what had happened.

“Jackpot,” Walter said as he pulled a stereo out of a wooden hutch in the great room and handed it to me. “If anyone asks, you work for Walter's Trash-Out,” he told me as I carried the machine out the front door. Lots of stuff went into the car—a Spiderman alarm clock, a set of stainless steel pots. Walter was elated. He jumped around, his one-piece green mechanic's suit billowing with air. In the basement, he had to turn the power off before he started slicing open walls to unthread the wires.

Nobody showed up to ask us any questions, and after a while I started to relax. Every room we went into was like a treasure chest. In the bedroom, I opened the top dresser drawer and found a blue velvet pouch full of jewellery. I pulled out a locket, heart-shaped, engraved with a winding pattern of vines. Inside were tiny black and white pictures of old people—a man with a handlebar moustache, a woman with her hair done up, smiling without showing her teeth. “Gold,” Margo said, coming up beside me. She opened the blue bag for me to drop the locket back in, but I closed my fist around it. “Just this,” I said because I knew what would happen to it—the miniature heart would be melted down, the pictures burned off, somebody's past disappeared. Margo shook her head. She took it from me, pulling the threadlike chain through my fingers. “Stop being sentimental.”

On
the way home, Walter wanted to stop right away to swap the gold for cash, but I asked him to drop me off first. Margo offered us granola bars that she'd taken from the house. “No, thanks,” I said.

She turned to Walter. “Sandy's grown a conscience.”

“Must be nice,” he said, his eyes hanging on to me, bloodshot and blue, moving to the road and back again. We drove in silence for a little while, passing a group of kids pushing their bicycles along the side of the road. Up ahead, the turquoise ring of a roller coaster twisted high above the buildings. “What did you and Marvin get up to the other night?” Walter asked.

Margo slid one finger into the closed fist of her other hand and giggled.

“Margo,” I snapped, annoyed.

“Down there in the dark zone?” Walter said, not letting up.

I didn't answer. All I wanted was out of the cramped, claustrophobic car, but Walter kept talking. I watched his mouth moving in the mirror as he told me things I didn't know.

“You know Marvin lives down in that filthy squat when his mother is loaded,” he said, his eyes meeting mine in the rear-view mirror. “That asshole doesn't know what he wants.” He opened and closed his remaining fingers on the steering wheel. “And Phoenix,” he snarled. “Fickle bitch.”

Margo stared into her lap, smiling, as Walter dragged his gaze over the landscape: an ocean of rooftops and the tall spirals of wood smoke climbing into the overcast sky. He pressed his lips tight together and all the light went out of his eyes. Momentarily, but I saw. When he turned back to Margo, a manic glow had relit itself in his face.

“They should be overthrown,” he said, as if we were talking about royalty.

By the time we got back home, I had a headache. Pressing a finger against my left temple, I leaned into the front of the car and asked Margo how much my share of the money would be.

“Nothing now,” she said.

“A couple weeks,” Walter told me, and Margo got out to let me onto the sidewalk. As I watched them drive away, I wondered where I would be by then.

On
that day I hatched another plan. It was all mine; none of the others had a part in it. Not the bum, as my mother would have called Marvin, if I'd ever told her about him, or Walter the disfigured, drug-addled lunatic, or the drama queen roommate I'd randomly met eleven months earlier. Instead, it involved Phoenix and Thomson. I liked them. With them I could have a chance at a good life, one my parents would be proud of. Not breaking windows or stealing. Down there, dishing out food to hungry people, I had felt useful, like I was contributing something, patching over small holes in the shambles all around us. Would they take me in? Was I brave enough to ask?

When Margo came home the next morning, I told her we needed groceries and I'd get them if she gave me fifty dollars. She hesitated. “What are you getting? Sirloin?”

“We're out of a lot of stuff,” I said, but she still only gave me thirty dollars.

Just before dusk, I set out. I bought a small bottle of whisky and took a taxi down to the dark zone. The driver dropped me off on the edge of the same pitted field I'd crossed with Marvin several days earlier. I slipped money through the slot in the thick plastic shield and he took it, turning to face me. His brown eyes soft with concern.

“Miss, are you sure?” I nodded and smiled, showing him I was where I was supposed to be. That time I looked the men at the gate full in the face before crouching to step through the hole in the fence. They didn't speak to me, but I felt their eyes on my back. My heartbeat drummed hard at the base of my throat. I couldn't help wondering what they would tell Marvin. He was still in my system. In my mind, I had already moved down to the diner. I had my own room, but I wasn't sure who'd be visiting me—Marvin with his secrets and his sex appeal, or Phoenix, keeping her own counsel, like a flower tightly shut until dawn.

The
restaurant was quiet, the door locked. I knocked, but no one came. The late-afternoon shadows were deepening so I went around the back looking for another way in. I saw the hives, capped in a crust of soot-speckled snow. A strange sound—a high-pitched vibration that I could feel in my skin—came through the glass door. The room was blurry like a soap opera flashback because the door was covered over in plastic, but I saw a candle glowing, Thomson reading and Phoenix with her mouth on the end of a long tube, its base on the floor. When I knocked, Thomson jumped. The music stopped. Phoenix straightened away from her instrument. She stood, uncertain, and when I knocked again, she walked over and peered through the blur at my face.

“Go to the front,” she said, her voice muffled as if time had slowed.

“Sorry,” I said over the jingling bells of the restaurant door. I stayed on the threshold, not moving until she reached out and tugged on the sleeve of my jacket, pulling me inside.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

I thought she would invite me in, lead me to the back room where she and Thomson had settled in for the night, like a pioneer family around the small, hot stove. Instead, she stared at me. “What are you doing here?”

I held out the whisky bottle, but she didn't take it. I told her. Not the whole truth. Not about Marvin and me or my morning with Walter and Margo. Not that I had no money and no job and didn't know what to do. Only that I wanted to help. Down there, with them. “I felt like I was making a difference,” I said. “The other night,” I added, in case she didn't remember.

Her face was stern—the way she looked when she was evaluating, assessing, as if playing a complicated game. Her scarf was off, and I noticed the short dark brown stubble that covered her head, white scars standing out like a small galaxy of stars.

“Come to the back.” I remember her smiling, but did she? Probably not. If I had been her I wouldn't have. I would have wondered what this woman—this girl—was angling at, with Marvin one night and the next appealing to her. It must have been obvious that I didn't know what I wanted, that I was stumbling between options. Phoenix walked the length of the diner. Her chin up, her body straight, she moved like some sort of storybook princess, and I followed as if under her command.

In
the back room, Thomson was sitting on the couch. He laid down a blue paperback novel titled
Black Robe
when we walked through the door. “Marvin's not with you,” he said, looking behind me.

“No.”

“You startled us.”

“Sorry,” I said for the second time, sitting in a leather chair patched with duct tape, moving aside the strange tube. It was hollow, painted with squiggly red and blue lines and yellow dots, the mouth thickened with what looked like wax. “What is this?”

“Didgeredoo,” said Phoenix. I waited for her to tell me more but she didn't. I offered the bottle to Thomson. He held it at arm's length so he could read the label, as if it was something special. Phoenix stuffed a broken picture frame into a tiny pot-bellied stove and pulled the side off a dresser drawer.

“This is made out east. By monks,” Thomson said, holding up the whisky. “Shall we try?”

“Sure,” I said.

Phoenix was busy with the fire so Thomson looked at me. I stuck a thumb back, toward the door into the restaurant. “Do you want me to . . . ?”

“You know where the glasses are.”

In the cold dark of the kitchen, the air smelled of onions, garlic, and a spice I couldn't name, buttery and strong. A row of mismatched glasses and mugs sat at the back of the chrome counter. I selected two—one fake crystal and another embossed with a black pattern of a twisting fish—and paused before grabbing another, a mug with
MARSON'S PLUMBING
on it above a phone number. It was a relief to step back from the cold into the close, comfortable heat. I set down the glasses. Thomson shimmied forward to the edge of the couch and opened the bottle. The cap made a cracking sound.