Authors: Sophie Littlefield
IN THE MORNING SHE WAS ALONE IN THE TENT
and she thought: Smoke is a man who comes and goes quietly.
And then she thought—
Ruthie
. Today was the day she would find out how to get inside the Convent, and she would search for her Ruthie.
Do the next right thing,
Pat’s voice—
Hello, my name is Pat and I’m an alcoholic
—said in her head, all reasonable insistence, the voice of a hundred meetings in the church basement. Pat listened; Pat never judged. Pat was bald except for a silver fringe on the back of his head and looked like he ought to be a grandfather, and Pat just kept listening.
What if I don’t know the next right thing,
Cass had demanded—had whined really, if she were to be honest—and Pat had said,
It’s only
one
little next right thing, Cass, don’t think so hard,
and the guy with the red hair—she couldn’t remember his name now because he didn’t last more than a few months—had muttered,
Man plans and God laughs,
which had struck Cass as funny and kind of clever, in context, a lot more clever than any of the stupid A.A. phrases…but by summer that guy was gone and Cass was still there so who was right, in the end?
So she would do the next right thing, and that thing was: Find Gloria.
She took the little bucket of personal supplies to the bathroom and was relieved to find that there was no further charge to use it, because Smoke had done all their trading and she didn’t know how it was done and she didn’t feel like letting her ignorance show. There was no sign of Smoke and Cass only saw a few other people trudging between the tents, shivering in hoodies and flannel shirts, and she realized that it was earlier than she’d first thought, maybe six or six-thirty on a late-summer morning.
When she returned to their tent she saw that Faye was standing in front of it, holding a steaming mug.
“There you are,” she said with a sly smile.
“Sorry, I was just at the, uh, ladies’ room.”
“Word is you two put on a bit of a show last night,” Faye said conversationally, and Cass felt her face redden. “Hey, you provided everyone some entertainment around here. And you got something that did you good. So chill. You ready to go meet Gloria?”
“Yeah, just let me get—something,” she said, and poked her head into the tent. Really, she only wanted to see if Smoke had returned, but nothing looked disturbed. The covers were still tangled. Her pack was where she left it.
“Okay, I’m ready.”
Faye led her through the camp. They passed the merchant stands, where people were stacking and arranging their wares—their toothbrushes and playing cards and packets of aspirin and Theraflu, their paper plates and toilet paper and candles and cans of beans and condensed milk and Chef Boyardee—and righting overturned camp chairs and cleaning up litter from the night before. A fire burned in a grate near where the remains of the bonfire smoldered, and coffee boiled in a pot on top, and Cass felt her stomach growl. Well, maybe later she could ask Smoke to buy her a meal. And coffee—a cup of hot, thick coffee. But for now she would concentrate on Gloria.
“Here,” Faye said abruptly, veering off to the left, past the fenced-off area where the bike Smoke had traded was parked next to other motorcycles and a few bicycles and skateboards. “The cheap seats.”
Cass hadn’t noticed them the night before—a row of canvas cots lined up next to the fence. In nearly all of them, motionless forms slept under drab, rough blankets, a few possessions piled under the ends of the beds.
Cass followed Faye to the end of the row, trying not to stare. At the very end a woman with long gray hair escaping its braid sat with her back to them at the edge of her cot, bent over her knees; too late Cass realized she was throwing up.
“Aw, shit, Gloria,” Faye exclaimed. “Here?”
“I’ll clean it up, I’ll clean it up,” the woman said hastily, her voice reedy and frail, a girl’s voice in a middle-aged woman’s body. “I’m sorry, I think I must have eaten something—”
“You mean, like a fifth of cheap gin,” Faye growled. “I’ll send someone. You didn’t get it on the bed, did you?”
“No, no, I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that.”
“Okay, well, I brought you someone who wants to talk to you. Take a walk with her. We’ll have this taken care of when you get back.”
“Yes. Yes, thank you,” Gloria said. She stood and started to walk down the path along the fence, not even looking at Cass, who hurried to catch up.
“You’re the girl wants to get in the Convent,” she said when Cass fell into step with her, stealing a sideways glance as though she was afraid of being found out. “They told me you’d come.”
Cass saw pale green eyes in a weathered face, lashes bleached by the sun, cheekbones that were still regal. Gloria had once been a beauty, but Cass saw something else, something that was as familiar to her as the chipped, heavy mugs at the meetings: more regrets than a human being could keep hidden, so that they found their way to the surface, traced in the faint lines and creases of her skin.
“I do want to get in,” she said carefully. “I need your help.”
The corner of Gloria’s mouth twitched, a tic that only underscored her anxiety, and darted a glance at Cass. “How do I know?”
“Know what?”
“That you’re who you say you are. That you’re not one of theirs.”
“One of…whose?”
Gloria’s tic intensified and she pressed a fist against her mouth, pushing hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “They could have sent you. Mother Cora and the rest. To spy on me.”
“Gloria…I don’t know who that is,” Cass said, trying to contain her impatience. “I just got here. I’ve never been in there. I need your help…please.”
“They’re not supposed to come in here,” Gloria whispered, walking with her shoulders hunched. “It’s Dor’s rule. It’s his
rule
.”
“The people…from the Convent, they aren’t allowed in here? In the Box?”
“They can’t come in here.”
“But I’m here. They let me in here. So, I can’t be from
there,
right?”
Cass felt a little silly trying to reason with Gloria, but she could tell that the woman’s fear was real. Very gently, Cass touched her thin shoulder. Gloria startled at the touch, but after a moment she sighed and gave Cass another sidelong glance, pushing at the long gray hair that had come loose and tumbled around her shoulders.
“I wish I had an elastic,” she said. “For my hair. Do you have an elastic?”
“No, I’m sorry,” Cass said.
“Okay. That’s how it is—anytime you think of something that would actually be useful, you can never find it.”
“You mean…”
“In my house, I lived on the first floor of a nice old house. You should have seen it…I had a collection of tea tins. The ones with the pretty designs on them. Some of them were my mother’s. Oh, some of them were very old. And I don’t know, they may have been valuable, to someone, but I didn’t even care about them. They were just…always there, you know?”
She sketched a shelf in the air with her fingers, and Cass knew she was seeing the tins in her mind, the way they looked in her kitchen. Cass had done the same thing a thousand times; nearly everyone had—remembering the things that were lost.
But then Gloria chopped the air with the hand that had been tracing a memory, a harsh gesture followed by a sharper exhalation. “I never used them. They were empty, all of them, and they sat there and I looked at them all the time and I never took them off the shelf and put anything in them. And then—one day, in the Convent, I was on washing. Me and a woman named…something. Maybe it was Alice. We were pinning the clothes on the line. We had the cheap clothespins, a pack of a thousand someone got from the Wal-Mart, but, you know, Before. And they were in this plastic bag and they kept spilling out and we tried to twist the top closed but it just kept opening, all those clothespins lying on the ground, and I thought, my tins—it would have been perfect. The clothespins in the tins, and I wished right then that I had one of them, even one, just one. I would put the clothespins in the tin and there would be that one perfect thing. The one thing that was the way it ought to be. You know?”
And the thing was, not only did Cass know but Gloria’s explanation was dead-on. She’d had the same complicated regret herself, over and over, the mourning for some small thing not because she missed the object itself but because in that moment everything seemed off. All solutions were imperfect solutions. And that wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily, because you learned to improvise, you learned to make do. Except for once in a while when it hit you like this.
“I know,” she said, and touched Gloria, gently.
Gloria looked at her, then looked at the arm where Cass had touched her, and her eyes clouded and she picked at her crusty chapped lip. “Why do you want to go in there? It’s not nice there.”
“Oh, I don’t. That’s not why I’m here. I don’t want to join. I’m looking for my daughter. Ruthie.”
As she said the name the feeling was there again, the fear that Ruthie was not in the great looming stadium, that she was nowhere near here. Maybe she was nowhere at all anymore.
Gloria put a hand to her cheek and frowned. “How old is your daughter?”
“Almost three.” Three in September, if anyone was still keeping track by then.
Gloria shook her head. “There’s little ones there. But they change all their names when they’re baptized.”
“Baptized?”
“Yes. Into the Order. In the ceremony, where they take their first communion and get their new names.” There was a note of sympathy in her voice, and she fixed her troubled gaze on Cass, her confusion momentarily lessened. “Tell me about your little girl. What does she look like?”
So Cass told: the hair so pale in the sun that it looked like flashing dimes. The rosebud mouth that could crumple into a wobbly frown one moment and lift into a blazing smile the next. The fold in her chubby arms where the baby fat was still smooth and soft.
As she talked Cass found herself speeding up, panicking, with the knowledge that her baby was months older now, that the rounded elbows and dimpled knees might have disappeared, that her hair would be longer and she would have a dozen new freckles and have learned to do things Cass couldn’t even imagine. Cass couldn’t know all the ways Ruthie would have grown and changed, and it felt like a betrayal.
“I don’t know,” Gloria said, interrupting Cass midsentence, shaking her head. “It’s too hard to know. And they change them. They mix them up like they mix me up. I heard talk.”
“What do you mean? What kind of talk?”
Gloria twisted her mouth into an expression of fury. “
Hypocritical
talk,” she spat. “The kind I can’t stand. The kind that drove me right back out here.”
Right back to the bottle—she didn’t say it, but it was clear to Cass, and Cass didn’t judge. She knew how it was—the filament that wasn’t strong enough, the way it stretched and stretched before it snapped, leaving you hurtling through the air toward devastation.
Still, there was hope. There were girls in the Convent, and one of them could be Ruthie, and she would find out, but she needed Gloria to focus. They approached an old picnic bench set on uneven ground under a dead pepper tree. “Let’s sit,” she suggested, sweeping dirt and twigs off the splintered wood, and Gloria sat, her expression troubled and confused.
“What kind of talk did you hear?” Cass pleaded, hoping the woman could keep it together a little longer.
“Talk talk,” Gloria muttered. She found a groove in the weathered wood with her forefinger. Her hands were surprisingly elegant, unlined and narrow with long fingers and neat nails. She rubbed at the groove gently, seemingly oblivious to the splintered edges. “They said I didn’t have enough faith. I said
they
didn’t have enough faith. I know what I know. I watched…the sun painted the rocks and I saw God, I told them that but they said I didn’t have the faith. I wouldn’t drink the essence so they said I didn’t have the faith.”
“Saw God…Gloria, when did you see God?”
Gloria’s skittering gaze landed on her and stayed, like a butterfly on a coneflower, skittish. “Matthew. Before Matthew…before he was gone.”
“Who was Matthew?”
“Matthew?” Gloria glared at her, affronted, and Cass watched her awareness fade in the eddies and whorls of memory. “I married him…we went to Yosemite. I watched God, in the mornings, the way he painted the rocks with the sun. Matthew was there. We were happy.” She startled out of her reverie and seemed surprised to find Cass there. “I
married
him,” she repeated, sternly. “We were happy. They can’t tell me I don’t have faith.”
Her twitching fingers went to her mouth again, covering, pinching, worrying, and Cass could sense Gloria turning inward again. Who knew what happened to Matthew…maybe he was Gloria’s childhood sweetheart, dead twenty years in an accident. Or maybe he’d been taken, or died of fever only months ago. Either way, Gloria wore the loss like an amulet, a token against the weight of Aftertime.
“I’m sorry about Matthew,” Cass said gently.
Gloria made a sound in her throat and nodded, dropping her hands to her lap. She only wanted to be heard, Cass thought—only that. And for things to be different. What anyone wanted.
But Cass needed more from her. “I’m so sorry to ask. But is there anything else you can tell me about what goes on in there? With the babies, the little girls? How they’re cared for, where they end up?”
Gloria was shaking her head before Cass finished speaking.
“Not little girls, not,” she mumbled. “Not little girls anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“When they’re done, when they’re baptized. They’re only vessels. There’s nothing left inside.”
“
WHAT,” CASS MANAGED TO WHISPER, HER
throat twisting closed.
“‘Be thou a vessel of innocence,’” Gloria chanted softly. The skin twitched near her left eye. “‘Scoured clean of this world.’ They baptized them.”
“What else did they do?”
“The hair and the dress,” Gloria mumbled. “All the little dresses. White for purity. Purity for innocence. And no talking. No, no, no talking.”
“They put them in baptism dresses?” Cass repeated, scrambling to make sense of Gloria’s tormented muttering. “And there’s no talking during the ceremony. And what happens next?”
“Scoured clean.”
The phrase raised the hairs along her arm. “What does that mean, Gloria? They…wash or scrub them somehow?”
Gloria peeked at Cass, her darting eyes bright with her fevered thoughts. “You won’t know her,” she said sadly. “Don’t go. She’s not yours anymore. She’s innocent now. And they hide them.”
Ruthie was always innocent,
Cass wanted to scream, wanted to make Gloria see her the way she had been, in her denim overalls and tiny little flowered t-shirt, falling asleep in Cass’s lap. But Gloria pushed herself off the bench and started walking again, her footsteps unsteady and lurching.
Cass went after her, put a hand on her arm. Gloria yanked away from her touch, crossing her arms tightly in front of her, shaking her head.
“Please,” Cass said. “Just—just tell me what you can. Anything, just help me get in there.”
“You can’t go in. You don’t believe.”
“I—” Cass stopped herself, considered her words. The wrong ones would make Gloria retreat even further. The haze of broken memories and tangled thoughts around Gloria seemed to condense and retreat when Cass was too direct, when she brought up specifics. But specifics were what she needed, a plan for gaining entry. “Did you believe?”
Gloria was silent for a moment. She touched her weathered fingertips to the chain link of the fence and let them trail along the metal—surely Gloria wasn’t the only resident who walked off her next-day ills around this track.
“Two ways,” she finally said. “If you’re a believer, that’s one. It has to show, though. I was real and it showed. God was with me then and it showed. Everyone could see it. You don’t have God on you, so that won’t work.”
Cass was surprised that the words stung. “Do you mean that I…” She struggled to find the right words. “I don’t seem pious enough? I can be different, I can—”
Gloria was shaking her head. “God comes and goes but he’s always there, but they don’t know that. You can’t put God on now—He’ll come back when He’s ready. But
they
don’t know that.”
“But how do I—what can I do to make them think I’m, you know, a believer?”
“You have to barter,” Gloria said. “You can buy your way in but you have to ask the right one.”
“The right one?”
“You have to ask the
right
one,” Gloria repeated, enunciating with care, as though speaking to someone with limited powers of comprehension. Her breath, redolent with rot and withered hope, washed over Cass and it was all she could do not to turn away.
“Please, tell me who the right one is.”
Now it was Gloria who wrapped her sunburned fingers around Cass’s arm and drew her into the shade of a clump of creosote bushes growing from a ditch eroded into the edge of the path. Cass glanced around; no one took note of them. They were hidden from the interior of the Box by a series of clotheslines strung on poles, sheets and pillowcases and towels flapping in the breeze. Someone was singing on the other side, a tuneless, wandering melody, too distant for Cass to make out words. The scent of cotton drying in the sun reached her and she inhaled deeply, but she caught herself before she could close her eyes and let the smell take her back to Before.
“It’ll cost you.”
There was a shrewdness to Gloria now. No surprise; thirst could conjure thin moments of clarity. Cass remembered. No matter how far gone you got, you could always get your shit together enough to go to the all-night liquor store when you ran into the bottom of the bottle.
“How much?” she asked, thinking of the bike Smoke had traded, the things he’d bought for them, the merchants with their carnival booths of enticements. She hadn’t wanted to take from him, to shift the balance in the strange and unwelcome ledger of their relationship, but what choice did she have? “I can pay.”
“What can you give me?” Gloria’s words were quick, eager, hungry.
“I don’t know,” Cass hedged. If she made it too easy, Gloria would tell her anything just to get the payoff quicker. “It depends on what you have to tell me.”
“Let’s get something now. Just a little.” Gloria’s voice went high and wheedling, and she twisted her lips into a smile that didn’t mask her thirst.
“Soon,” Cass said. “But we need to talk first.”
“I can talk during, you know. I can talk and we can share. We could share, couldn’t we?”
Her eagerness both repelled Cass and tore at her heart. It had been hard enough, Before, when she could drink her nights away in the solitude of her trailer. When she had a paycheck, no matter how paltry, to trade for the numbness. She’d never had to beg like this.
“How have you been getting by?” she asked Gloria softly.
Gloria blinked rapidly and glanced toward the far end of the Box, her fingertips going to her throat in a nervous, protective gesture. “I…do some things.”
Cass suddenly understood. The blue tents—the groping in the dark and muffled cries of release. A hand job for a six-pack of warm beer. Ten minutes on your knees to buy a few hours of oblivion. And yet Gloria seemed to prefer life in the Box—drinking down the wages of cut-rate blow jobs, sleeping on a cot out in the elements, marking time with the level in the bottle—to life in the Order.
She’d come here thinking of the Convent as a place of safety, of sanctuary. It was well guarded against the threats of Aftertime—Beaters as well as Rebuilders and raiders. But Gloria was clearly afraid of it, and she couldn’t even tell Cass exactly what had become of Ruthie. Now, staring at the tall curved walls lit up with the yellow sun of midmorning, Cass wondered what waited for her.
“Let’s just talk,” Cass said gently. “And then we’ll get you taken care of. I promise.”
The sun was high in the sky by the time Gloria finished telling her what she knew, which guards on which shift traded with the outside, which took bribes. Gloria’s words wandered and drifted and in the end Cass had no names to go by, just sketchy descriptions. Gloria said Cass should try in the late afternoon, which was the most coveted shift and hence the one that the most powerful guards in the Order—the crooked ones—kept for themselves. The Order’s ranks had swelled and they were turning away far more would-be members than they accepted.
Even here, cunning trumped good intentions. Had it always been that way? Sometimes it seemed to Cass that the way it had been Before, the codes and habits of social order, were shifting and changing in her memory, like a dream she was forgetting. But all that mattered now was that the odds of buying her way in were better than talking her way in.
It wasn’t much. But at least she could pay. It would have to do.
There was one last thing that Cass wanted, and Gloria knew someone who could take care of it. After Cass bought her a plastic soda bottle filled with cloudy liquor—the cheapest they had, signed for with Smoke’s name—Gloria led Cass through the rows of tents on their way to the Box’s only barber, sipping from the bottle along the whole way. Already she was more relaxed; the tremors in her fingers disappeared, and the deep grooves eased from the corners of her mouth and between her brows—almost making up for the vacancy in her watery eyes.
Near the end of the tents, where sleeping quarters gave way to a row of barter stands and shacks, a dusky-skinned man with a heavy, limping gait and chains looped from his belt stepped in front of them.
“Hey, Glor—i—a,” he said drawing out the syllables of her name suggestively. “New batch come in this morning. Young ones, guess they went to DePaul community college, been living in a dorm there. Lost a couple on the trip…they’re a mess. Better hope none of ’em decide to stay back here and cut into your business. They’re smokin’ hot, know what I mean?”
He pantomimed an obscene bump and grind, winking at Cass.
“Fuck you, Haskins,” Gloria muttered, pushing him out of the way and stumbling past. “You’ll be at my door by tonight begging for it.”
“Just ignore him,” Cass said, his laughter following them down the row.
“He’ll be back,” Gloria muttered, “Can’t stay away.”
But as they continued down the path it seemed to Cass that she walked with less certainty. Cass figured she understood: the biggest downside to making a living by selling off bits of your soul—what happened if one day they quit buying?
But by the time they reached the barber stand, Gloria seemed to have recovered, and when Cass tried to give her a hug she slipped away, her eyes already focused elsewhere. Cass watched her go, her long silver hair catching the sun despite its knots and snarls, and tried not to think about where she was headed.
A man tilted back in a deck chair under an awning constructed from a tarp, feet up on a stump, reading a paperback in the shade of a large straw hat. Elaborate vine tattoos snaked up both arms, disappearing into his t-shirt. He marked his place with a dollar bill and tipped his chair down. When he stood and took off his hat, Cass saw that his hair was shaved into an elaborate spiral pattern.
“At your service,” he said with an exaggerated bow. “I’m Vinson. Can I do something for you today?”
“Yes. I…thought you could even it up.”
She touched the jagged ends of her hair self-consciously. It was vanity, sheer vanity, and she felt her face color at the thought. She was doing this for Smoke, and that was not all right, so she forced him out of her mind and focused on her hair. It was her one pretty feature, according to her mother; at eighteen Cass had chopped it short and dyed it black, anything to further the wedge between her and Mim.
Growing her hair out had been a first step back, when she started to get better, when she started to believe in herself again. When she realized that to be good enough for Ruthie, she had to treat herself as though she was good enough. It had taken so long, so much hard work, to start to believe; and her hair had been a small daily reminder to take care of herself.
Now it was ugly again. But maybe there was a way to make it all right.
She looked over the table where the tools of Vinson’s trade were laid out: a straight razor, scissors, combs, mirrors, a spray bottle of water. Small towels were folded and stacked. “I can pay, later. If that’s okay. I—we—have credit.”
“Ah,” Vinson said. “You’re the girl who came in with Smoke.”
“You know him?”
“By reputation only, until last night. We had a drink together.”
Whiskey on his breath
. The memory of their fevered coupling flooded Cass’s mind, and she felt herself flush, her veins throbbing with the mad coursing of her blood. “Oh, he’s, he’s…around here somewhere.”
“This one’s on the house, then. For what he did, standing up to the Rebuilders. Times are only going to get harder. We’ll need more like him.”
“You think they’ll come here?” Cass asked. “All this way?”
“They’ve already been here, make no mistake about that,” Vinson said, pulling over a chair and motioning for her to sit. “Just the scouts so far, coming around to see what we’ve got before they send their little army in. Only I figure your pal Smoke might’ve given them something to think about.”
He chuckled as he wrapped an old bedsheet around her, cape style, fastening it with a binder clip. He picked up the bottle and started spraying water on her hair, lifting it with his fingers. The cool mist felt good on her skin, and Cass relaxed a little.
“You mean, because he killed some of them.”
Vinson snorted. “Not just anyone, either, angel. He took out Tapp—the guy who started that whole mess. Remember when they used to hunt Bin Laden all over the place Before? Well, it was like that—Tapp was the big leader, the figure-head, and your buddy Smoke blew his head off and left the body twitching like a stuck pig. And you can bet the guys he let go ran back to tell the story all over Colima.”
Cass thought of Evangeline, her cruel eyes and ruthless smile. “They’ll just keep coming, though.”
“That’s right. That’s right. That crew’s relentless. They ain’t giving up, that’s for sure.” He picked up a well-tended, clean pair of shears. “So, this was a do-it-yourself job? No problem, I’m getting pretty good at cleaning those up.”
Cass flinched with the first cut, but after that it went smoothly, as the shears found a rhythm. Vinson hummed, a tune familiar but also not, wandering up and down a minor scale. Cass closed her eyes and let drowsiness take her over. When she felt his hands in her hair, brushing out the stray cut pieces, she sighed with the pleasure of a moment of luxury.
“How about I throw in a little extra service? I don’t exactly have customers lined up, and it’s been a while since I got to try anything fun.”
“What was it you used to do?” Cass asked, as he picked up a plastic tub of boxes and bottles that had been stowed beneath the table.
“Tattoos, mostly, and piercing. But don’t worry, I’m trained for hair, too. Went to school and all, cut hair in a Supercuts before I got my shop.”
Cass put her fingers to her hair. It was short and silky against her fingertips, longer in the back than near the front, where the new growth blended in. No one would know that she had pulled her own hair from her scalp, that a scant month or two ago she had been fevered and frantic. Touching her hair, Cass realized that for the first time she was able to swallow back the thought without it nearly killing her.
“Yes,” she said softly. “Do it.”
An hour later she smelled faintly of ammonia and her soft brown roots faded to white at the tips. Vinson waved away her promises to make sure he was paid. “I’ll see Smoke tonight, I’ll get him to buy me a drink and we’ll call it square.”