The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly (4 page)

“All right, then,” Dr. Wilson says. “It's a deal.”

I sit up straighter. “I'd shake your hand, but . . .”

He smiles.

“So,” I say. “Where do we begin?”

T
he lunch bell tolls, and the jail wakes up with the sound of doors buzzing unlocked and feet traversing metal walkways.

“Why don't we pick this up another day?” The doctor closes his notebook.

“You just got here,” I say.

“I'll be back later in the week.” He lifts his stool up from the ground and tucks it awkwardly beneath his arm.

I walk the opposite direction down the skyway, glancing behind me at Wilson's back. He's about to walk right out of here, to freedom. He can do that and I can't. The moment I realize this, I hate him for it, just a little.

In the cafeteria, I look around for Angel through the throng of girls with grizzled faces and big fists who make the blood jerk in my chest. Without hands, everyone else's are a threat. Angel told me how these girls can fashion a weapon out of anything, an elbow, a bolt loosened from a classroom chair, a sharpened shard of plastic broken off a laundry basket. When someone gets you with one, they don't just stab you once. They have a partner hold you down while they stick you in any soft places they can.

Angel strolls in through the cafeteria doors, and the orange sea of bodies parts around her. She is one of the only first-degree murderers here and even the big girls with eyes like caged bulls' steer wide of her. There are so many people here that it seems like every mealtime someone is glimpsing me for the first time, gaping as though they've never seen anything as bizarre. As though we're not all missing some pieces.

I stand behind Angel in line. She's reading a book with a red cover. When I ask her what it's about she doesn't even look up. “Too complicated to explain,” she says.

“Try,” I say.

She pauses. “Do you know what Mars is?”

I shrug.

“Well, some people think we ought to go there. Leave Earth behind.”

“It's supposed to be better there?” I ask.

“Supposed to be.”

We wind toward the counter where the girls hold their trays out to the lunch ladies behind a plastic partition. A tray will be waiting there for me specially, everything on it items I can either suck through a straw or carry to my mouth with my stumps without much trouble.

Nearly to the counter, a tall girl pushes in front of me in line and I lose sight of Angel. The back of my neck prickles. I glance behind me at the pulsing wall of thirty or so girls, pinched eyes and bulbous knuckles and shifting weight. I put an arm on the girl's shoulder to push in front of her. “Get outta my way,” I say.

Without looking, the girl jerks her elbow back and connects with the side of my face. I blink sudden tears and scan the room for a guard. None are looking this way.

I dodge to the side so I can make sure Angel is still there in front of the girl.

“Back in line!” comes the voice of Officer Prosser, one of the few guards who makes us refer to her by her official title. She has a pile of wiry red hair clutched to the top of her head with a large plastic clip.

I step back. The line moves achingly slow, and when it's my turn, I lever my tray up with my forearms and nearly run to where Angel's sitting.

“Calm down, crazy,” she hisses. “You weren't gonna get shanked with that many guards around.”

I shake my head. I touch my forearm to my cheek, which still stings from the sharp plane of the girl's elbow.

“God, you are greener than green,” she says. “Stop looking around at everyone. Keep your eyes down.”

“It's hard,” I say.

“They're not that scary,” she says. “See that one over there?” She nods at a brown-haired girl hunched over her tray, placing peas on her tongue and swallowing, one by one, like pills. “Her name's Wendy. She's going to Billings after this, that's the adult prison. She confessed to assaulting her eight-year-old neighbor with a baseball bat. I read about it—they didn't have hardly enough evidence to convict. Lots of girls confess just to feel like they're doing the right thing. Sometimes the cops'll make them think they can go home if they just say they did it, though you'd have to be a total idiot to believe that.” She swallows a huge mouthful of mashed potatoes. “These girls, naw, they're pancakes. Most are pumped so full of Adderall they can hardly walk, let alone shank you. The real crazies aren't allowed in gen pop. They live up in the hospital most of the time.”

“It's different for you,” I say. “You make them scared.”

“Then give them something to be afraid of,” she says. “You're a badass bitch. You've done way worse than half these girls.” She rummages with her fork into a small potpie and chews for a moment. “Is there some other reason you don't like them?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

She gives me a hard look from the corner of her eye. “You just see it a lot, is all. Little country girls get thrown in here.” She waves to the other girls, and I know in that gesture she's acknowledging their differences, their different-shaped eyes, some ringed in charcoal-like lines, their different lips with shades of sparkle and shine adhered to them. “Let's just say it wouldn't be the first time I got a roommate who had a problem with it.”

“I'm not looking at them because I'm scared,” I say. “It's just . . . for all those years, I never saw anybody different from me. The Prophet didn't believe it was possible, all these people living side by side. He told us people who didn't look like us were evil.”

She nods her head knowingly. “Yeah. There are plenty of people out there who think the same thing.”

“There was a boy I knew,” I say tentatively, and I know I'm speaking almost too quiet to be heard above the din of the cafeteria, but I can't speak louder because it feels wrong bringing him to life in this place. “His name was Jude. He lived in the forest. I met him when I was fourteen.”

Angel puts down her plastic fork. “He was your boyfriend?”

I nod, though I never called him that.

“And he was a different color?” she asks, wariness palpable in her voice.

I nod again.

“And what happened to him?” The way she asks it, I know she already knows the answer.

I look straight into the miniature blue discs inside each of her eyes, inside the angry folds of her face, and tell her. “They killed him,” I whisper. “I think they really killed him.”

T
he night we met was warm, stars hot in a black sky. I sprinted through the trees with tears tumbling down my face. I was fourteen, and I had decided I was going to run away.

I knew I must've been one of the first to ever leave the Community. The Prophet taught us that our little clearing was protected by God, that if we ever left, the Gentiles would hunt us down with their bullets and heat-seeking missiles and poison gas, that on every telephone pole in every city hung wanted posters with our faces. He said that every Gentile knew the name Minnow Bly, and they cursed it.

Earlier that night, I'd fought with Vivienne, my father's third wife. I'd dropped a dish during washing, and she stuck out her rigid finger and gave me that tired old lecture about how it was almost time for me to marry and no man would want me if I didn't arrange myself into the shape of a good woman. “Fine, then I won't marry!” I said, and she reminded me that the job of a Kevinian woman was to marry. If a woman doesn't marry, what's the purpose of her? I threw down my dishrag right then, because I knew everybody else agreed with her.

I was out of breath from running. A stitch in my side made me gutter to a stop at the edge of a clearing.

My footfalls were almost silent over the scattered, dead pine needles, but he noticed. The boy, sitting on the front porch of his family's handmade cabin. I had never seen someone like him for so many reasons, for the way his shoulders fell back easy as he stripped pine needles from a twig, for the way his feet sat bare and dusty inside the rolled hems of homespun trousers, for the way his skin was a brown color I hadn't seen since we moved to the Community. I could feel the window through which I viewed the world—no larger than a pinhole back then—broadening somewhere at the back of my mind just by looking at him. I couldn't open my eyes wide enough. I wanted to stare at him for lifetimes, the perfect pores of him, his high eyebrows serene, like he'd never seen how angry God could be.

His eyes found me where I stood, sheltered in the shadows. There was a quiet moment when neither of us spoke, each of us standing with a new tension in our backbones, his shocked forehead, my parted lips and fingers splayed to my sides.

“Are you one of those cult people?” he asked after a moment.

My lips snapped shut. “We're not a cult.”

“That's not what my daddy says.”

“Well, I'd know, wouldn't I?”

He squinted at me. “You sure look like a cult person.”

I glanced down at my long navy dress, belled at the elbows and waist. I touched my little white bonnet self-consciously.

“And you look like a ragamuffin,” I responded. “Don't you have shoes?”

“I got 'em. I just don't wear 'em unless I need to.” He buried his toes in the fallen pine needles. “You're not supposed to be here. There're signs all along our land. ‘Keep Out,' ‘Private Property,' ‘No Trespassing.' Didn't you see 'em?”

I remembered the livid black and red signs speared to tree trunks with railroad spikes. “I saw.”

“Then why didn't you keep out? Cain't you read?”

I pulled my bottom lip into my mouth and pressed my teeth together.

“You cain't read?” he asked, quieter.

“And you can?” I asked.

“Sure, my momma taught me.”

“You got books?” I asked, taking a step closer.

“We got two Bibles.”

“What's a Bible?”

“You don't know what the Bible is?” His mouth opened so I could see a minuscule chip in his front tooth.

“No,” I said. “Else I wouldn't ask, would I?”

“It's, like, a big book with stories that God wrote,” he said.

“We got one of those. The Book of Prophecies.”

“But the Bible don't just have prophecies; it has stories.”

“The Book of Prophecies has stories, too,” I said. “Like Chad and the Golden Bear, and Eric turning blood to gold, and Victor stealing a demon's pheasant-green slippers that held all its power. And—and Marcus, the first man, who married the first three women, who were born out of three chestnuts in the same lime-colored pod—”

But Jude was shaking his head. “Those sound made up.”

“They're not. Marcus made all the wheat fields out of the hair of his blond wife, and the trees out of the hair of his brown-haired wife, and fire out of the hair of his redheaded wife. We wouldn't have fire and trees and wheat if it weren't for those first wives.”

“That ain't in the Bible.”

“So?”

“So they ain't real. They sound like bedtime stories.”

I fell backward a step. Nobody had ever talked like that. If the stories were wrong, the Prophet was wrong, and even thinking that could poison the blood in a person's veins. God had claimed the Prophet years ago, had cured his astigmatism and taken away his asthma so he no longer needed to puff from his inhaler as he walked across the factory floor. I was there when he took his thick, yellowed glasses in his fists and bent them until they broke. The Prophet was a miracle.

“You—you don't know what you're talking about,” I sputtered. “Your Bible's probably just lies.”

“No, it ain't! It's all true and if you think that, you're not a real Christian.”

“You're right, I'm not a Christian! I'm a Kevinian.”

“A what?” he asked.

“That's our religion. Our prophet's named Kevin.”

“A prophet named
Kevin
?” Jude scoffed. “Now it's definitely all made up.”

“How do you know, huh? You're probably telling tales just so you can be right.”

“No, I ain't. My daddy taught me everything I know, and he's not wrong about nothing.”

One of the little twists of his dreadlocks fell onto his forehead and he brushed it aside angrily. All at once, I had to purse my lips to keep down a breathy, giddy laugh. Here I was talking to someone. Fighting with someone. What a novelty. What a prize.

“You didn't even choose it yourself, then?” I asked. “You just go along with what your
daddy
says? Some of us make our own decisions. Some of us don't just think whatever our parents tell us to.” I didn't mention the fact that everything I believed, I believed because of my parents, too.

Jude's face fell. “I have to do what my daddy says.” His voice came quiet.

The sorrow that pounded out of Jude's eyes made me stagger backward a step. It was hard sorrow, hot sorrow, the kind that's had a long time to ferment. I couldn't have known that, in that moment, Jude wasn't thinking of me but of the empty cavern of his mother's skull, the after-smell of a gunshot.

“I better go,” I said softly. “I'll get in trouble if they know I left.”

“Okay,” Jude said. “Maybe . . . maybe we'll see each other again sometime.”

The wind whipped past my ear, and I imagined it was the Prophet's cold breath.

I wasn't supposed to talk to people like Jude. He was a Gentile, an outsider, and that meant he was wrong and wicked and wanted us dead.

Worst of all, he was a Rymanite, people the Prophet had warned us about, people God had abandoned centuries ago, and they were the worst kind of evil.

Except
,
I thought, and after that nothing was really the same again. Except Jude didn't seem evil at all.

I clenched and unclenched my fingers.

“Yes,” I said, holding my hand up in a wave. “I know we will.”