South Village (Ash McKenna) (22 page)

“C’mon,” he says. “Let’s go sit out in the sun. Give this all a few minutes.”

The clearing is empty now. We sit on a bench together, leaning back against the table. He’s close to me, and it feels good, him being close.

“So… what do we know?” he asks.

“Last night, there was a meeting. Some people from camp. The Soldiers of Gaia are planning to hit something, but we don’t know what.”

“That’s right. They’re not based here. Looks like Marx is trying to get in on the action. He’s a soldier, not a general. That’s good. He’s using this place to recruit. That’s not good. Seems you’re the key to all this.”

“Why me?”

“They know you have the cipher. Or at least, they’re assuming you have the cipher.”

“Right. The book, god what was the name of the fucking book?” This is so goddamn frustrating. The words are all there, encased in a block of ice, and I feel like I’m using a dull spoon to chip it away so I can reach them.

“
The Monkey Wrench Gang
,” Aesop says.

“Right. I found it. I know where it is. It’s at a store. A store got back to me. We can go and get it.”

“Good,” he says. “If we find it, we have a chance of stopping them.”

“We?”

“Well, after the FBI came in and fucked up our shit, I’m not going to them,” Aesop says. “Tibo seems to think Ford is trustworthy, but I’m still trying to figure out if Tibo is trustworthy.”

“He is,” I tell him. “I think he is. I’ve known him for so long.”

“Leadership changes people.”

“Well, whatever. The important thing is, we can decode the fucking cipher. We can get the book. We can do that, and decide what to do next.”

“Good. Let’s get your tea and something to eat and we’ll go. I’d rather not be here anyway. This place is starting to make me nervous.”

We step into the kitchen and Aesop walks over to the tray of mushrooms on the oven. He pops a couple into his mouth, chews, and makes a face.

“Ash, where did you get these?”

I nod toward the sink. “Your bowl.”

Aesop pulls the bowl toward him, looks down into it, and goes white. He puts his hand over his mouth.

“Destroying angels,” he says.

“What?”

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even indicate that he heard me. He moves quickly, putting some fresh and cooked mushrooms into a sandwich bag, then dumps the remaining mushrooms into the trash. He pours the contents of my mug into a battered blue thermos, which he hands to me.

“We have to go to the hospital,” he says.

He steps to the trashcan, sticks his fingers down his throat, and heaves. Coughs and spits chunks until his mouth is clear, and looks up at me.

“Right fucking now,” he says.

W
e’re at the car before he finally slows down enough that I can ask him, “What the hell is going on?”

He climbs into the driver’s seat so I circle around to the passenger side. “I’m okay to drive but if I need you to, you might have to take over. Can you handle that?”

“Yes, but tell me what’s happening.”

He starts the engine, slams the pedal down, sending up a spray of gravel and dust.

“Amanita bisporigera,” he says. “Those mushrooms. They’re called destroying angels. It’ll be hours before the symptoms hit, and by then it’ll be too late.”

“Fuck.”

“Fuck is right,” he says. “Someone left them there for us.”

“Who…”

“That’s not important right now,” he says. “Focus. Do you think you’re okay to handle the car? How do you feel?”

I look out the window, at the world passing by. My vision is wavy on the edges, things flitting in and out, but the adrenaline is helping to keep me focused.

“Ash!”

“I’ll be okay. Are you going to be okay?”

“As long as I get treatment quickly, I should be.” He pauses. “I should be.”

He sounds far less sure the second time he says it.

We drive some more. I open the top of the thermos and sip at the tea. It’s hot and tastes terrible. My hand shakes a little. I turn the cap closed so I don’t spill any of it.

“I want to tell you something,” he says. “I don’t know a lot about amatoxin poisoning. I know it’s very, very bad. If I’m going to die, I can’t die holding onto this. I need to tell someone this.”

“Okay,” I tell him.

Aesop swings onto the road at the same time that he reaches across and slams his fist on the glove box. It pops open to reveal a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He opens it up, takes one cigarette and a pink lighter out. Crumples it and tosses it into the back seat. He fires up, and the car fills with cigarette smoke. He opens the window and the smoke gets sucked out. He takes a deep drag with his entire body, blows it out.

“There were two guys in my unit,” he says, his voice drifting to someplace distant. “Sick bastards. They stuck together ‘cause you could tell no one else would want to stick with them. And… it’s a whole big story I could get into, I guess, but I kind of don’t want to get into particulars.”

He takes a drag of his cigarette. Contemplates it between his fingers.

“They were hunters,” he says. “Little kids, specifically.”

He glances my way, to gauge my reaction. I don’t know how to react to that.

“The way they figured it, Iraqi kids were expendable,” he said. “We were killing enough innocent civilians by accident. What were a few more? Apparently it went on for a while. The brass found out about it. They covered it up. If word got out it would be a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. So I killed them both.”

He takes a drag, lets the smoke pour out of his lungs.

“That’s… terrible,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. “The reason I killed them is, I caught them. They were… there was a boy. Couldn’t have been more than ten. When I found them he was dead. And the mother… her husband had been killed and now her boy was dead. And she begged me. She begged. Do you understand that?”

He looks at me, back at the road. His voice cracks, tears forming in the corner of his eyes.

“She begged me,” he says. “She said she couldn’t go on like that.”

He looks back and forth, between me and the road. Crying full now, and I don’t know what he’s looking for. Consolation. Forgiveness. I don’t know what I can give him other than listening. My emotional core feels like it’s been tossed into a blender, and now this.

A deathbed confession.

At least, that’s what it feels like to Aesop.

He doesn’t talk for a little while, just drives like he knows where he’s going. I have no idea. I don’t know where the closest hospital is. At this point, I feel as useless as a doorknob drilled into a brick wall.

Aesop takes one last drag of the cigarette, down to the filter, and tosses it out the window. The tears are gone. The composure is back. His voice is level again.

“I killed twenty-nine people over there,” he says. “And for some fucking reason, I don’t regret her. I saw it in her eyes. The second I stepped out of there she was going to open her wrists. What I did was a kindness. It’s those two assholes I regret killing.”

“Because they got off easy,” I tell him.

He looks at me, kind of surprised, and nods.

“What happened after that?” I ask.

“I got what’s called an Other Than Honorable Conditions Discharge,” he says. “They didn’t want to give me an Honorable Discharge, and they didn’t want to run the risk of burning me so bad with a Dishonorable Discharge that I’d go to the press.”

“Why not go to the press? Why not report it?”

“Because… they weren’t wrong. Can you imagine anything worse than that? It sets the cycle anew. They weren’t going to stop, so I made them stop. The only safe thing to do was live with it.”

We come up on a red light. Aesop weaves around the car waiting at it, almost gets creamed by a car coming the other way, speeds on.

“I killed a man,” I tell him, the words jumping out of my mouth. Quiet, like I’m hiding from them. Aesop doesn’t say anything. Just leaves me room to speak.

“I didn’t mean to kill him. I was protecting someone and… it happened. And ever since then I’ve had this feeling like I’m drowning. That’s the thing. The wave. The thing pulling me down. It’s why I was drinking. Drinking was the only thing that got me through the day. It was the only thing that helped me sleep at night.”

We pull up on the hospital, a massive sandstone building with glass and metal accents, a red cross at the top, glittering in the sunlight. Aesop doesn’t even bother finding a spot, pulls the car into the ambulance bay. He turns off the car and twists in his seat so he’s looking at me, but I’m already drowning. It’s the first I’ve said it aloud to another person.

He puts his hand on the back of my neck and looks me in the eyes.

“Now you know you can die,” he says. “Now you know how fragile all of this is. When you realize that, it’s a lot.”

And he lets me go.

The wave recedes.

Just like that. The roaring stops. I can feel the sand under my feet. I can stand tall and lift myself above the waterline.

“Do you understand what I mean?” he asks.

I nod, breathe in, and throw myself around him. Press my face into his neck and sob. I can’t help myself. My body feels light. Like I’ve been carrying something heavy up a hill and set it down.

He pulls away from me, crying a little too, and kisses me on the cheek, squeezing the back of my neck again. I feel naked. It’s the only way I can put it that makes sense. We linger in it, neither of us wanting to leave the car, for fear of what lies outside.

Except we have to go, because Aesop is dying.

“Now, c’mon,” he says. “If we can manage it, I’d like to live to see this whole mess through.”

T
he waiting room in the ER is nearly empty. Long rows of green leather chairs, a few dotted with people dozing off or watching a baseball game on a flatscreen television mounted on the wall.

A black woman in pink scrubs is sitting behind the counter, the only employee in sight. She’s talking on the phone, curling a loop of her long black hair around a finger tipped by a long orange nail. She barely looks up at us as Aesop puts the plastic bag containing the mushrooms on the counter.

The woman’s nametag says “Brenda” in white lettering on black plastic.

Brenda slides a clipboard overflowing with forms across the counter at us without breaking the flow of her conversation. Which is basically her offering positive affirmations like “really” and “oh sure” and “I believe so.”

“Excuse me,” Aesop says.

Brenda sticks an orange nail into the air, indicating she needs a minute.

Aesop reaches across the counter and presses his finger on the black plastic tab, hanging up the call. Her eyes go wide with rage and I am pretty sure she is going to tear his trachea out.

“You may have a minute, but I don’t,” he says. “I’ve ingested extremely poisonous mushrooms.”

She purses her lips and looks at us like we’re both dummies.

“Well why didn’t you say so?” she asks.

“I was trying to…”

She nods toward the hallway. “Triage. First door.” She picks up the ringing phone and speaks into it, but I can’t hear what she says because we’re already turning the corner, Aesop balancing the bag of mushrooms on top of the clipboard.

The triage room is small, with two chairs and some machines and cabinets. There’s a young nurse in green scrubs, her light brown hair twisted into short dreads. She says something into a phone and starts taking Aesop’s vitals, moving around him efficiently as he scribbles at the forms.

I linger in the hallway. I can feel the buzzing of the fluorescent light on my skin. It feels like ants. Ghosts dance at the edge of my vision, moving back and forth at the end of the long hallway. When I turn to look at them they’re gone. I don’t feel safe in the hall so I step into the room. Another nurse arrives, a kid with acne and a bad bowl cut. He’s wearing bright blue scrubs and looks barely out of high school. He hands Aesop a cup of thick, black liquid, which Aesop drinks, grimacing as he holds it to his lips. He pulls it away from his mouth and his teeth are black.

I think I’m hallucinating again. The male nurse looks at my face and says, “Activated charcoal.”

“This does not taste good,” Aesop says. And he drinks some more.

The male nurse turns to me. “We have to get him inside. Are you family?”

“No, just… a friend.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to sit in the waiting room.”

Aesop gets up, tosses me the keys to the car. I don’t put my hand up in time and they fly into the hallway, where they hit the floor and skid into the wall. He rolls his eyes. “Take care of my car. You’re going to be okay. Keep up on the tea.”

The two nurses lead Aesop through another door.

And I’m alone.

I
watch the Braves beat on the Mets for four innings. I should feel bad because the Mets are my home team, but I was always partial to the Yankees. I sip at the tea, which is cooling off, which makes it taste worse. The ER stays mostly empty. A guy comes in with a blood-soaked towel wrapped around his hand. He sits for five minutes and goes in. There’s another guy here who was asleep when I came in and he hasn’t woken up yet.