The House of the Scorpion (10 page)

M
att was wildly excited. Not only were they going on a picnic, but they would travel by horseback. Matt had seen horses from the windows of the little house. And of course he’d seen them on TV. Cowboys and big, tough
bandidos
rode them. His favorite hero was El Látigo Negro, the Black Whip. El Látigo Negro was on TV every Saturday. He wore a black mask and rescued poor people from evil capitalists. His favorite weapon was a long whip with which he could peel an apple while it was still on the tree.

Matt was more than a little disappointed when Tam Lin brought out a sleepy gray horse instead of the spirited steed El Látigo Negro rode. “Be reasonable, lad,” said the bodyguard, tightening the girths on the saddle. “We’re after reliability, not speed. El Patrón wouldn’t take it at all well if you were dumped on your head.”

Once Matt was perched on the saddle in front of Tam Lin, he forgot all about his disappointment. He was riding! He was high in the air, swaying along with the smell of horse all around him. He felt the coarse hair of the mane and pressed his ankles against the warm coat of the animal.

After all those months without talking, Matt couldn’t wait to catch up. He chattered about everything he saw—the blue sky, the birds, the flies buzzing around the horse’s ears.

Tam Lin didn’t stop him. He grunted occasionally to show he was listening and directed the horse along a dirt path. They plodded through the poppy fields and gradually moved away from the Big House toward the gray-brown hills that lay on the horizon.

The first fields they encountered were covered with a mist of new leaves. These were the seedlings. Matt had watched the growing cycle from the window of the little house, and he knew what to expect. The older plants were larger and rounder—like small cabbages—and the leaves were tinged with blue. As they rode, the plants became larger until they were as high as the belly of the horse. Buds opened into crinkled petals in a glory of white under the hot sun. A faint perfume hung in the air.

They came to fields where the petals had fallen. These lay in drifts all over the ground while the seedpods they left behind stuck up like green thumbs. The pods had swelled until they were the size of hen’s eggs and ready for harvest.

Matt saw the first Farm laborers. He’d observed them before, but Celia had warned him to hide from strangers, so he hadn’t watched them closely. Now he saw that both men and women wore tan uniforms and wide, straw hats. They walked slowly, bending down with tiny knives to slash the pods. “Why are they doing that?” Matt asked.

“To release the opium,” replied Tam Lin. “The sap oozes out and hardens overnight. In the morning the workers scrape it off. They can collect from the same plant four or five times.”

On and on the horse plodded. The fields shimmered with heat, and a sweet odor with something rotten at its core filled the air. The workers bent and slashed, bent and slashed in a hypnotic rhythm. They didn’t speak. They didn’t even wipe the sweat off their faces.

“Don’t they get tired?” Matt asked.

“Oh, aye. They do,” said Tam Lin.

At last the horse came to a deserted field. The plants were beginning to dry. A hot breeze rattled the leaves. “Look! There’s a man lying on the ground,” cried Matt.

Tam Lin halted the horse and got down. “Stay,” he ordered the animal. Matt clung tightly to the mane. He didn’t feel at all safe so far off the ground. Tam Lin strode over to the man, bent down, and felt his neck. He shook his head and returned.

“Can’t we—can’t we help him?” faltered Matt.

“It’s too late for that poor soul,” grunted the bodyguard.

“What about the doctor?”

“I told you it’s too late! You want to get your ears cleaned!” Tam Lin hoisted himself back into the saddle and ordered the horse to go on. Matt looked back, tears stinging his eyes. The man was quickly hidden by the poppy plants.

Why was it too late? Matt wondered. The man must be terribly hot, lying as he was in the full sun. Why couldn’t they stop and give him water? Matt knew they had water. He could hear it sloshing in Tam Lin’s backpack.

“We could go back—” Matt began again.

“Damn it!” roared the bodyguard. He halted the horse and sat for a moment, breathing hard. Matt looked at the ground and wondered whether he had the nerve to jump off if Tam Lin really lost his temper.

“I forget. Kids your age don’t know anything,” said Tam Lin at last. “The man is dead. Heat or lack of water killed him. The cleanup crews at the end of the day will find him.”

The horse moved on. Matt had even more questions now, but he was too unsure of Tam Lin’s temper to ask them. Why hadn’t the man gone home when he got sick? Why hadn’t the other workers helped him?
Why was he being left out there like apiece of trash?

All the while, they were riding along a range of hills that bordered the fields. Now they turned off into a dry streambed that led into the hills. Tam Lin got down and led the horse under a cliff, where it would have shade. Nearby was a trough and a pump, which he worked vigorously to bring up the water. The horse was sweating. Its eyes watched the trough, but it didn’t move.

“Drink,” said Tam Lin. The horse trotted forward and dipped its muzzle. It blew noisy bubbles as it drank ravenously. “We’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“Can’t we take the horse?” said Matt, looking doubtfully at the streambed snaking into the hills.

“It wouldn’t obey. It’s programmed to stay on the Farm.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a Safe Horse, which means it has an implant in its head. It won’t bolt or jump. It won’t even drink unless you tell it to.”

Matt digested that idea for a moment. “Not even if it’s very thirsty?” he said at last.

“It was thirsty just now,” said Tam Lin. “If I hadn’t told it to drink, it would have stood in front of the trough until it died. Stay,” he told the horse.

Shouldering a backpack, he started up the dry stream. Matt scrambled after him. At first the way wasn’t difficult, but soon it was blocked by boulders they had to climb. Matt wasn’t used to exercise, and he quickly found himself out of breath. He didn’t stop, though, because he was afraid Tam Lin would leave him behind. Finally the bodyguard heard him gasping and turned back. He hunted through the backpack. “Here. Drink some water. Have a bite of beef jerky too. The salt’ll do you good.”

Matt devoured the beef jerky. It tasted wonderful.

“Not much farther, laddie. You’re doing very well for a hothouse plant.”

They came to a giant boulder that seemed to block the trail until Matt saw a round hole in the middle. It was worn smooth like the hole in a donut. Tam Lin climbed through and reached back to help Matt.

The scene on the other side was completely unexpected. Creosote bushes and paloverde trees framed a small, narrow valley, and in the center of this was a pool of water. At the far end Matt saw an enormous grapevine sprawled over a manmade trellis. In the water itself, Matt saw shoals of little brown fish that darted away from his shadow.

“This is what you call an oasis,” said Tam Lin, throwing down his pack and taking out food for the picnic. “Not bad, eh?”

“Not bad!” agreed Matt, accepting a sandwich.

“I found this place years ago when I first started working for El Patrón. The Alacráns don’t know about it. If they did, they’d run a pipe in here and take out all the water. I hope I can count on you to keep the secret.”

Matt nodded, his mouth full of sandwich.

“Don’t tell María either. She can’t help blabbing.”

“Okay,” said Matt, proud that Tam Lin considered him responsible enough to keep a secret.

“I brought you here for two reasons,” said the bodyguard. “One, because it’s nice. And two, because I want to tell you a few things without being spied on.”

Matt looked up, surprised.

“You never know who’s listening to you in that house. You’re too young to understand much, and I wouldn’t say anything if you were a real boy.” Tam Lin tossed bread crumbs into the pool. The little fish rose to the surface to feed. “But you’re a clone,” he went on. “You haven’t got anyone to explain things to you. You’re alone in a way real humans can’t understand. Even orphans can look at pictures and say, ‘That’s me ma and that’s me da.’”

“Am I a machine?” Matt blurted out.

“Machine? Oh, no.”

“Then how was I made?”

Tam Lin laughed. “If you were a real boy, I’d tell you to ask your big brother that tricky little question. Well, lad, the best way to describe it is this: A long, long time ago some doctors took a piece of skin from El Patrón. They froze it so it would keep. Then, about eight years ago, they took a bit of that skin and grew it into a whole new El Patrón. Only they had to start at the beginning with a baby. That was you.”

“That was me?” asked Matt.

“It was.”

“So I’m just a
piece of skin?”

“Now I’ve gone and upset you,” said Tam Lin. “The skin was what you might call a photograph. All the information was there to grow a real copy—skin, hair, bones, and brain—of a real man. You’re exactly like El Patrón when he was seven years old.”

Matt looked down at his toes. That’s all he was: a photograph.

“They put that piece of skin into a special kind of cow. You grew inside, and when the time came, you were born. Only, of course, you didn’t have a father or a mother.”

“Tom said I was puked up by a cow,” said Matt.

“Tom is a filthy little pustule,” said Tarn Lin. “And so is the rest ofthat family. If you quote me, I’ll deny it.” He brought out a bag of trail mix and passed it to Matt. “To continue: Being a clone, you’re different and a lot of people are afraid of you.”

“They hate me,” Matt said simply.

“Aye. Some do.” Tam Lin stood up and stretched his big muscles. He paced back and forth on the sand where they were having their picnic. He hated to sit still for long. “But some love you. I’m speaking of María and, of course, Celia.”

“And El Patrón.”

“Ah, well. El Patrón’s a special case. To be honest, the number of people who love you is small and the number who hate you is large. They can’t get around the fact that you’re a clone. It makes it hard to send you to school.”

“I know.” Matt thought bitterly of María. If she really loved him, she’d take him with her and not care about how the other kids felt.

“El Patrón insists that you be educated and live, as nearly as possible, a normal life. The problem is, no private teacher wants to teach a clone. And so the Alacráns got an eejit.”

Matt was startled. He’d heard the word so often—mostly from María—he’d thought it was only a swear word, like
dum-dum
or
cootie face
.

“An eejit is a person or animal with an implant in its head,” said Tam Lin.

“Like the horse?” said Matt as a terrible thought occurred to him.

“Correct. Eejits can do only simple things. They pick fruit or sweep floors or, as you’ve seen, harvest opium.”

“The Farm workers are eejits!” cried Matt.

“That’s why they work without resting until the foreman orders them to stop and why they don’t drink water unless someone tells them to.”

Matt’s thoughts were whirling. If the horse could stand there and
die
in front of a trough of water, then the man—

“The man,” he said aloud.

“You’re bright as a button, lad,” said Tam Lin. “The man we saw on the ground probably lagged behind the other workers and didn’t hear the foreman tell them to stop. He might have worked all night, getting thirstier and thirstier—”

“Stop!” shrilled Matt. He covered his ears. This was horrible! He didn’t want to know any more.

Tam Lin was at his side at once. “That’s enough lessons for one day. We’re on a picnic and we haven’t had any fun yet. Come on. I’ll show you a beehive and a coyote den. Everything lives around water in the desert.”

They spent the rest of the day exploring the burrows, the crevices, the hidden lairs of the secret valley. Tam Lin might not have gone to school for too long, but he knew a great deal about nature. He taught Matt to sit still and wait for things to come to him. He told him how to tell the mood of a beehive by its hum. He pointed out droppings and tracks and bone fragments.

Finally, as shadows began to fill up the oasis, Tam Lin helped Matt climb through the hole in the rock and return to the horse. It was waiting exactly where they’d left it. Tam Lin ordered it to take another drink before they set off.

The fields were empty, and the long shadows of hills flowed across the land. Where they ended, the late-afternoon sun made the poppies glow with a golden light. They passed the dry field where the man’s body had lain, but it was gone.

“Teacher was an eejit,” said Matt, breaking the silence.

“She was one of the brighter ones,” said Tam Lin. “Even so, she could do only one lesson over and over.”

“Will she come back?”

“No.” The bodyguard sighed. “They’ll put her to work mending curtains or peeling potatoes. Let’s talk about something more cheerful.”

“Could
you
teach me?” asked Matt.

Tam Lin let out a bellow of genuine laughter. “I could if you wanted to learn how to break desks with karate chops. I reckon you’ll do your schooling off the TV. I’ll be around to hang you out the window by your ankles if you don’t study.”

8
THE EEJIT IN THE DRY FIELD