The Unit (18 page)

Scotty is flying. He can see and he can fly and I’ll always accept forevermore that miracles happen. It’s cold in the plane and Scott tells the old man to turn on the heater. I push the knife against his leathery neck and he leans forward and turns a knob and throws a switch. Dust streams from the vents and we cough, but then a wave of engine-heated air brushes against my arms and face and begins to sneak inside my clothes. It’s the best feeling I’ve had in a long time. Sure, our campfires warmed the front or the back of me, but this heat is something else. It embraces me from all directions and I shiver, remembering how it feels to be comfortable. Remembering how it feels to receive a gift. Surrounded by heat. Something as simple as that is magical now, after months of living at whatever temperature Mother Earth preferred.

I get drowsy and I wonder if any other simple pleasures are in store for us. I don’t know if we’ll make it to safety, if such a place exists, but the heat has me in a good mood. The sweet womb of heat and Scotty is whole and well and I’m even grateful for the knife and the big revolver God has seen fit to provide for me. Loaves and fishes and heat and a knife and a cowboy gun to bring justice to the world. A healthy son and, God willing, a safe husband and daughter. I pray for them as we fly at night above volcanic mountains. I’m grateful that I’m in danger, too, because it makes me feel less guilty about not being with Jerry and Melanie. I have no doubt that Jerry will kill some of the boys. Maybe he doesn’t want to, but it isn’t a question of choice.

When I almost begin to drift off, I open a packet of MRE instant coffee and take a pinch of the dry crystals into my mouth. I give some to Scotty, and I can’t see him very well in the glow of the instruments, but I imagine that his lips are blackened with the instant coffee, and his teeth and his tongue, and that reminds me of when he was little. He’d get a kick out of eating Popsicles, purple grape was his favorite, and then sticking his tongue out at us and chasing his sister, trying to lick the back of her neck with his stained tongue, laughing his way through a summer day. What a joker he was. How long ago that was.

Old Bill pulls a bag from under his seat and starts to dig through it. I tell him to stop, and he does. I tell him to hand the bag to me, and he does. It’s a cloth book bag and it’s filled with music CDs. Bill points to the instrument panel.

“I jury-rigged a sound system. Figure I might as well have some music while I’m being kidnapped.”

I look through the music and it’s all Southern Fried Rock from the seventies, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers and Molly Hatchet. It’s the kind of music that delinquents in Oregon used to listen to when I was a kid. I give the bag back to him and he chooses a CD and pushes it into what looks like a car stereo. The sound of twangy voices and guitars brings thoughts of Oregon into my head, and I have to fight an urge to tap my foot to the music.

Now that I’m not fighting for our lives, the thoughts come. There isn’t any way to steer them in pleasant directions. What have we done? We were supposed to be better than the Baby Boomers, more grounded and levelheaded and respectful and less selfish. We managed to survive long enough to inherit the world, but just look what we’ve made of it.

It wasn’t us who nuked our cities, but we allowed it to happen. We didn’t mistrust terrorists and dictators as much as we mistrusted each other. We forgot about Pearl Harbor and 9/11. We pulled out of the Middle East, finally, and threw money at it. The money was supposed to work like fire retardant, but it didn’t. All those billions and trillions to Israel and Egypt and Jordan. AIDS relief. Poverty relief. We gave and gave and gave, and what do we have to show for it? Somebody nuked us and who’s helping
us
now?

It’s all on our heads and hearts now, another unremarkable generation that wanted to change the world. And we have changed it. Oh
my
, yes we have.

We’re following the highway. That damned road is still our guide. Scott flies low, but even then we lose sight of the ground for tense minutes at a time. We’re in clouds and then we’re in dark sky. I hope the clouds aren’t radioactive. We’ve been lucky, so far. The jet stream flows to the north of us, and that’s what kept us out of the death clouds. But poor Oregon. The clouds are almost certainly stacked up over it, as they always are this time of year, but now the clouds are hot, hot, hot. I hope someone lives. I hope the trees remain, at least. The flowers and crops of the Willamette Valley and the deer and elk in the Coast Range and Cascades. The black bear and cougar and salmon and trout.

My mother is gone, God bless her, but I hope the mud of the Willamette Valley is still fertile. I’ve always wanted to retire in Oregon. I haven’t ever told Jerry, but part of me always planned to end up back there. Back home, where I could visit the old neighborhood where people knew the unsavory parts of my history, yes, but also the basic goodness of my family. Americans have shallow roots, but I miss the sweet, sad feeling of being a Northwesterner. The feeling of being strong and reliable when I’m four months into a nine-month rainy season. The feeling of wearing flannel without irony and driving up old logging roads into wilderness that has no street signs or lights, traveling to places where you could die of exposure if you weren’t careful. Nameless clearcuts and roaring campfires. The luxury of feasting on trout pan-fried with butter and salt and dill in the midst of the dark temperate rain forest. Toasting marshmallows after. The smell of beer on my father’s breath as he told us scary-funny tales about Sasquatch. The glow of my mother’s eyes in the firelight, smiling. The feeling of being in the wilderness, but being safe as I said my prayers and climbed into my sleeping bag.

That’s the part of Oregon I hope is left.

We almost fly into a series of big power lines then. They’re right in the windshield and Scott adds power and pulls back on the controls and it pushes my guts down into my lap. Both Scott and Old Bill are swearing their heads off, but we come through the other side just fine. They swear for a while longer and then they laugh as if they’re old friends. But then the silence gets heavy again, and we drone on into the night.

I’m looking forward to daylight so Scotty can take us up high and we can fly in a straight line. The Lord said in His Good Book that the most honorable roads were intended to be straight and narrow. God brings the moon out from behind the clouds for us. It’s the first time I’ve seen the moon since the bombs went off. Maybe our Lord and Savior is showing off. Maybe He thinks it’s the least He can do, considering.

So I watch the milky glow of the moonlit road beneath us. The dead cars and trucks look soft beneath us, and I imagine they’re already beginning to decay. Snowy patches on the ground give a hint of our speed. That sweet, man-made heat keeps blowing from the vents, and it smells like hot metal and progress and freedom and the luxury of peace. All of my being wants to begin the celebration of our survival, but I know it’s too soon, and so I push the joy back into its bottle and save it on a shelf in my mind, for later.

They have him and he’s here with me now. That’s a curse for him and maybe an improvement for me. He killed two of them to get here. There are only sixteen boys now, and they’re so pissed off about Dad’s attack that they’re ripping their own hair out. They’re also beating on Dad. But Bill Junior won’t let them kill him.

Bill Junior says something and the beating stops and they drag Dad over to the fire. I’m handcuffed to the steering wheel of a wrecked cop car. Bill Junior uncuffs me.

“Help your old man. If you run, he dies.”

I don’t say anything. When I was a little girl I always thanked people for everything they did for me, but then I learned about the power of silence. I get up and try to find the right wrecked car, and then I do. I open the trunk. The boys use the trunks like drawers to stash their plunder, and I was lucky enough to see where they put the medical supplies. I pull out gauze bandages and antibiotic ointment and Ace bandages. There isn’t any medical tape for the bandages, but there’s no shortage of duct tape.

The boys don’t visit me anymore. I’m slightly more than meat now, probably because they want me to get my dad to give them millions. It’s all bullshit, but my Goggy is with me now, sleeping, I hope. Most of his head is wrapped in silver duct tape. The boys get drunk and they get into another of their stupid fistfights, two of them fighting in the firelight, and the others placing bets, and then one boy gets knocked out cold and the rest of them leave one by one and pass out in their motel rooms and cars and shacks.

It’s been years since I spent time alone with my dad, but it doesn’t seem that long ago. We were a busy family that really only came together once a year, at Christmastime.

“This isn’t much of a vacation, Dad,” I say.

He doesn’t answer, not that I expected him to, but I keep talking. He’s unconscious, maybe in a coma, and everyone who ever watched TV knows that people in comas might be listening for friendly voices to guide them back into the world. So I give him one.

“Do you remember it, Dad—the good things? I’m pretty sure you remember the time I got busted smoking pot. I told you it was the first and the last time I tried it, and I loved that you pretended to believe me when I told you that. But listen, it
was
the last time. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I thought you should know. It wasn’t your fault that I tried weed. I know you and Mom must’ve gotten high when you were young. I’ve seen the pictures of the eighties. Greed is good. A person couldn’t walk down the street without getting propositioned by a coke dealer, right?”

His breathing speeds up and I think maybe he can hear me.

“But it’s not your fault that the world was a shithole when you were young, just like it’s not your fault that this happened.”

His eyelids flutter and I keep talking.

“Do you remember when I rode a bike on two wheels for the first time? When I won the all-around in varsity gymnastics? Do you remember my first boyfriend?”

I tell him about things that happened in my childhood to see if he remembers them. His eyelids don’t flutter again. I imagine he’s trying to remember, but when those things happened, he wasn’t there. He was always at work. So I trick myself into believing he
was
there. And then I start to make up memories, just to guess what his answers might be. Remember when I hit that line drive in softball and beaned the pitcher? He sends out a vibe like,
Sure. Who could forget that?
I know he’s lying, but I don’t give him
the look
. The “you’re full of shit” look.

It never happened. I never beaned any pitcher with a line drive, but I wish I had. Nope. It didn’t happen, and even if it
had
happened, my dad was at work. But I can’t stop lying, and neither can he, even though he’s in a coma. I tell him lies and he sends out untruthful vibes until our lies become wistful what-ifs and apologies. Remember when…? Sure I do. And the time when…? That was a great day, wasn’t it? And so on, until we make up this wonderful, wonderful life that never happened, my dad always right with me to cheer me on, no matter what.

But then I can’t help myself from being kind of mad at him. He’s a mess and I’m a mess, and we have all this baggage. But sometimes we can break through all of that. He surprises me sometimes by being not so uptight. Sometimes he doesn’t drink too much, and he isn’t an asshole, and sometimes I can appreciate it. I haven’t thought about it forever, but there was this one time when we really broke through the crap.

When I was thirteen, I argued with him so much that he stopped opening his mouth for a while there. I don’t know how many times I told him I hated him, but he didn’t run away from me. He didn’t lock himself in his study or go for long drives like some dads would’ve done. No, he sat next to me on the couch. Not too close, but not too far away, either. He wouldn’t look at me and his face was serious and he didn’t talk, but he was sending out this vibe that I couldn’t understand. At that age, I was pissed off when I woke up in the morning and pissed off when I went to bed, so at first I took his silence for criticism. So I’d sit there for a while, then mutter a few vile things and stomp away to my room.

But it made me curious, the way he kept sitting next to me. He might’ve had a small drink before he sat down, but he didn’t keep drinking, like he usually did. I stopped muttering at him when he squeezed himself onto the opposite end of the couch. I stopped running to my room. I stopped looking at him, too, and he didn’t change his game, so we sat on opposite ends of the couch. We didn’t say a word and we didn’t look at each other, either, and it was like some kind of contest. We sat and we sat and we sat. Isn’t that something from Dr. Seuss? But that’s what we did, and it was like a competition. We’d sit after dinner and watch whatever was on the tube, the news or cartoons or PBS. Whatever. And we wouldn’t bitch or change the channel. We’d just sit and work very hard at ignoring each other, even though we were only about three feet apart.

We became very good at it. I could go into a state that was close to a coma. Dad would let his eyes narrow to slits and he’d breathe without sound through his mouth like he’d just fallen asleep. We were like cold-blooded animals, dormant right there in the living room. Maybe we were mediums channeling the emptiness that existed before us, and after us, and always. We sat for hours and I could never tell who won the competition, but after a while it started to crack me up. When he puts his mind to it, Dad is pretty good at cracking me up. He’d do weird things to get me to laugh, and that was one of them. And I
did
start to laugh at his game, but I couldn’t let it show. I’d sit like a corpse but I’d be laughing my ass off, inside. Weird or disgusting things would come on TV and Dad would be looking right at it, but he wouldn’t move a muscle, and that cracked me up. We watched ads for erectile dysfunction, and we didn’t flinch. We watched ads for products that treat vaginal dryness and diarrhea and genital warts, but we didn’t break our silence, and so we showed each other just how we felt about the culture of television, and how we felt about life in general, and maybe how we felt about each other, all without saying a word. Genius, huh?