The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (11 page)

July

Biking and hiking through the sharp rocky hills of Idaho. Some of them are too steep to bike, but we’ve been dragging them up. It helps speed things along and I know we’re making better time than we would on our feet.

* * * * *

They camped out one night in a huge luxury RV they found abandoned at a rest stop along a freeway. It had a glass bubble ceiling above the loft and they both lay on their backs, looking up at the stark and cloudless sky.

“So you’re a dyke, right?”

Alex thought for a while before answering. In the old days at nursing school, she had stretched this answer out in long sociological discussions of identity, fluidity, gender normative behavior in a heteronormative society.

Yes. No. Sometimes. Say yes, maybe she’ll want to sleep with me.

“I dated mostly women. In school. But my most serious long term relationship was with a man. Whatever you want to call that.”

Roxanne smoked and the long curls of it hit the glass and pooled. It smelled awful, but Alex wasn’t about to send her away. She cracked the roof hatch.

“I just figured.”

“I didn’t always dress like a dude. This is a safety measure.”

“Yeah but what if you found some people? A guy who could take care of you? He could defend you, hunt for food so you don’t have to? What are you gonna do when canned goods run out and you gotta shoot deer to live?”

I just shot six guys. Did she just forget that? Don’t fight. Talk easy.

Alex crossed her arms behind her head. “Shoot deer, I guess. Or fish. I haven’t seen any deer.”

Roxanne turned toward her, up on an elbow. She stubbed out her cigarette and automatically lit another. “We did, when we were in California for a bit. In the hills there were mule deer with huge ears and huge feet. I think you can eat them.”

“That’s good news. Anyway, why would I sell myself to a bunch of guys who keep me for somewhere to stick it? What kind of deal could I make?”

Roxanne smoked and sighed. “I would have talked myself off that chain. They were just scared we’d run. It wouldn’t have lasted.”

Alex didn’t answer.

“I know what guys are like. I worked the pole when I was younger, then retired into waitressing like everyone does. Guys think they’re always in charge, but you can manipulate the shit out of them. We hold all the cards.”

“Not anymore.”

“What, babies? They don’t give a shit. Besides, every man on earth thinks his dick is magic and he’ll be the one to turn it all around. You think they don’t? You should have seen them fight over Shawna, trying to guess who knocked her up. We still hold the cards.”

“If you say so.”

“What, you don’t believe me?”

“I believe I found you chained up and naked. I don’t think you held much then. Didn’t you say they tased you and kidnapped you? Didn’t I have to treat you for abrasions and infections in your vagina? That’s not a lot of cards, is it?”

She was quiet for a long time. “They didn’t have a taser.”

“So...?”

“Nettie had a taser. She kept it on her since she got raped back in ’05. Katrina. She moved to Vegas right after. I met her at a bar and we moved in together. I loved her so much. I didn’t have any idea I could love a girl like that.”

“I don’t understand.” Alex turned to look at her, finally. Roxanne’s face in the starlight and smoke was like a leather mask.

“Nettie had the taser. We could hear them coming. She gave it to me good right in the neck. To slow them down. So she could get away. I hope she still has it.”

Alex stayed awake long after she had fallen asleep. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamt she was an auctioneer, selling every girl she had ever loved to men with long knives. Her dream tasted like ash.

Let’s just say it’s the 4th of July

Fucking Idaho is nothing but hills. Up and down and can’t ever see what’s ahead. We walk the bikes half the time, but it’s still not as bad as walking. Long stretch of nothing so we’ve been sleeping in the open. Hate hate hate that = hardly sleep at all, but it’s what we’ve got.

Traveling with Roxanne = totally different than being alone. Just having someone to talk to = enormous relief. She’s asleep right now. Stars all out and the world is completely full of bugs. Twitches in her sleep when she gets bit, but doesn’t wake. Could sleep through anything. Doesn’t complain, got a sharp eye. Got to find a place to raid bug spray. Sign says there’s a town in 20 miles. Should make it there tomorrow. Hoping for good hunter’s bug spray, stacks of jerky, and new cotton underwear. Dreamworld. Really need water and a portable filter = can drink the water we find without worrying.

Of course she asked where I was when it all went down. Guess this is the new 9/11 for those who made it through to remember where we were. Wasn’t one day, it wasn’t like you were walking down the street and heard that the world was ending. Don’t want to do this over and over again. Started as unsettling pictures on the news and then people in some other city were dying. Fucking government closed stadiums and airports, people on the news in yellow suits. Dead people. People in your city, on your block. By the time it was on top of us it was too late to mark the time. Remember where I was, because I was always at the hospital. NO. On call and sleeping when I could, there. NO. Told her some about the deliveries, about the dead and dying women and babies, about getting sick myself and waking up dehydrated, confused, and alone. NO NO NO. Don’t want to ask back = polite to ask back. Are we very polite savages now? Gave her the book. Told her to write it down. Fresh page.

THE BOOK OF ROXANNE

I was living with Nettie in Vegas. She was younger and better looking than me, she was a cocktail waitress at Caesar’s. Good tips but she had to wear these killer heels. Her feet always hurt. I worked at Sam’s Town. Good crowd, but mostly older. I wore lower heels but balanced it out with this tit job. I made less in tips but more per hour. Neither of us drank, we belonged to the same gym, had a nice little place in Henderson. It was good.

So when the shit hit the fan, nothing really changed. Vegas is like its own planet. Nobody watches the news or wants to think about real life.

Tourists were still pouring in for a week or so, but then I started to see a change. One day it was like there were no Asians at all, and let me tell you, there are more Asians in Vegas than there are in Asia. I came home from work and told Nettie about it and she looked at me with her eyes big and said it was true on the strip, too. We were used to seeing a lot of foreigners but, all of a sudden there weren’t any. No Eurotrash, no beautiful black men so dark they were blurple with their strange accents and bright yellow gold jewelry. I couldn’t find anybody but drive-in tourists from California and Arizona. I started asking around, listening for New Yorkers or a dumbfuck with a southern accent. It was creepy, like the world was shrinking.

Then they shut down McCarran and everybody freaked. I saw people hitchhiking out of town, offering a thousand dollars for a ride in a minivan, trying to get home or get out. I started seeing sick people on the street. At first I thought I was seeing bad nighttime makeup in the daylight- bright red cheeks and eyes with too much black liner. But these girls had fever. You could feel it baking off of them. Some guys, too. I hit the grocery store in Henderson and it was a mob scene. I bought water and toilet paper and chocolate pudding, don’t know what I was thinking. I like pudding. I don’t know. I got home and found Nettie sick, laying on the couch, burning up. I took care of her for days. She burned so hot I thought she’d have brain damage. 911 was busy and stayed busy. I locked up the house and made soup and forced her to drink.

The phone lines went out, but I couldn’t get anyone to answer anyway. Then the power went off, and the water went with it. After about a week her fever broke. She was skinny and tired, but alive. We had to move to a house with a pool, a block down. It was empty. We stayed there until the water started to grow algae. We loaded up some bottled rich bitch fizzy water and drove to some condos we knew- high end with an indoor pool and all that shit. We stayed there until we got caught.

We were always hiding. We caught on slow that we didn’t see any women, and groups of men seemed to be roaming everywhere. The first night in the condos we stayed up on a top floor. We heard screaming outside and we peeked through the window, kneeling on the floor. We saw a gang of maybe ten guys run down this screaming lady- she was maybe thirty. Heavy. She couldn’t run for shit and they caught her and took turns at her. At first she screamed and fought and Nettie held her ears and sat down on the floor. Eventually though, she just laid there and took it. They turned her over and pinned her arms and it took them a while to run out of new ideas. When it was over, they had to carry her away. They went toward another high rise and we didn’t see them again. Nettie strapped her taser to her leg and told me she wasn’t going to get caught and raped. She would fight and she would kill. I nodded, but I didn’t know what the fuck we would do if we got caught by that many guys. Probably nothing.

It was maybe ten days later when we were found out. We were on the second floor of an office building, heating up some soup. They must have been watching us, because they came straight toward the building, along the back route we used to sneak in. We had broken some glass and thrown it all over the stairs so we could hear someone coming. They were quiet, but the glass crunching did it. Nettie looked at me with those huge wide eyes. She asked me how many. I couldn’t tell her by the sound. She got her taser in her hand and said she was ready. I stood up and faced the door, holding a pipe wrench I had found and thought I could swing. She jammed it into my neck from behind and when I woke up she was gone and Aaron and the guys had started the party without me. I stayed limp, made no noise at all. Manny ate our soup while he waited his turn. When they were done, they helped me up to my feet and said we had to hit the road. Aaron looked at me and said they’d protect me, because there were some terrible men out there these days. He really believed I was better off with them. I could see it.

I didn’t talk much. I started learning them the way I used to when I was stripping. Learn their needs, learn what they’re sensitive about, learn how to work’em. The key to stripping was never to fuck them, or at least not until they said the right number. I knew that chip was gone, but there were other things they wanted. Reassurance. Something like intimacy. Men don’t know how to ask for that, they think they can steal it. When they realize they can’t, they know they have no power. I didn’t tell anyone I’d had a hysterectomy, I let them argue over whether or not I was too old. The fairly constant gangbang kept me bleeding enough for the illusion to stand.

We were lost for a while. When we found Melissa, I hoped she’d make it. Her boyfriend fought like hell to protect them both but he didn’t have a gun. He must have known he would fail. In the end he told the girl to run and he tried to hold them off. He died for her, but he barely got a lick in. They shot him and then ran her down. She cried for weeks. She never stopped, she even cried in her sleep. She was the flavor of the week and I got a little time off. I got convinced I could run away while they were all drunk and I actually tried. That’s how we ended up chained. I could have gotten us unchained, eventually. The weather got warmer and we ended up naked almost all the time. Melissa ran blood down her legs seemed like every day. I started getting us small things, baths for instance. It’s so much more appealing to fuck a girl who’s bathed this week. I started insisting that we get fed the same, hinting about maybe getting pregnant and needing vitamins. And I started picking my favorites and being a little more cooperative with them. I tried to get Melissa to do it too, but she couldn’t. She had never turned a trick in her life. I never heard her story, but some things about her I could just tell.