Stranger

Nine

Some invasion. The trucks skidded to a stop fifty yards from the gate in clouds of dust. We climbed out with the guard sergeants telling us to take it nice and easy; to stay back until the “threat had been quantified.” Jeez. Why don’t those guys speak so you can understand them?

There, under a cloudless blue sky, the wall ran from left to right, cutting across the highway and single rail-road track. Both ends of that mountain range of barbed wire ended in the water at either side of the land bridge. The guards’ officers-in real life a butcher, a cinema manager and a retired police chief- moved toward the gate. Someone handed me a shotgun and a handful of shells that I stuffed into my shirt pockets. I squinted against the glare of the sun. Through the monster of a steel gate I saw the invasion force.

Hell. Misnomers were thick as dog shit in a municipal park. Well, let me tell you, the invasion force consisted of a family in a sedan. The car was glossily clean.

It couldn’t have come far. Two of the car’s occupants climbed out, leaving a young woman in the passenger seat. She stared out at us, her eyes pumped full of anxiety.

The two who came forward to the gate were a man in his thirties and a boy of around eleven. Like the car they were clean; the man had shaved recently. Both were unarmed.

The stranger talked to the officers at the gate, though I noticed the three officers hung well back- you don’t know what filthy little microbes are peeling themselves from the strangers, do you, boys? I even saw one of them take a glance at the flag to see which way the breeze was blowing. The truth of the matter was, there was no breeze today. The lake was as flat as a mirror.

Curiosity got the better of us. We moved forward to hear the conversation.

“You’ve got to,” the stranger was saying… hell, not saying, pleading. He wanted something so bad it hurt.

“I’m sorry.” The cinema manager indicated a sign painted on a five-by-five board. “No one’s allowed in.”

“But my wife’s pregnant. She needs to be where she can get medical attention.”

“What’s wrong with the place you’ve just come from?”

“We’ve been living in a cabin up in the hills.”

“Go back there. You’ll be safe.”

The man shook his head. “There’s no one else there. She needs a doctor to look at her. Besides, we’re running short of food.”

“Got a rifle?”

“Yes, but-”

“Hunt, then. Catch food. The woods are full of wild game.”

“But don’t you understand?” The man sounded angry now. “My wife is seven months pregnant. She’s not been well lately. She needs a doctor.”

At that moment the woman pulled herself from the car, using the door to lever herself upright. “Jim, tell him about my brother.”

“OK, Tina, just you take it easy.” He looked at the boy. “Mark, go look after your Mom while I talk.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the retired police chief spoke now in that polite but firm voice he must have used a million times before in his career. “You’re going to have to turn your car around and leave the island.”

“What goddam fucking island?” The stranger’s patience had reached burn out. “It’s not an island. It’s a fucking town at the edge of a fucking lake…”

“Jim,” the woman pleaded, “Don’t get mad at them. They’re just being cautious.”

“Tina, OK. Sit back in the car.”

“They don’t know us, Jim. For all they know we might be-”

“Bread bandits? Hey, guys. Do we look like bread bandits?”

“No,” replied the old police chief, “but you can’t-”

“Then let us in. Please.”

“Sorry.”

“But you can see my wife isn’t well.”

“We’re taking no chances.”

“But do we look South American? We’re from a place that’s three hours’ north of here.”

“What place?” asked the ex-chief.

“Golant, just off Route 3. Look, I’ve got a driver’s license that-”

The ex-chief gave a regretful sigh. “Sorry. No can do.

We’ve reached a decision to seal this town off from the outside. We can’t risk contamination.”

“Contamination! Do you think my wife and my son and my unborn child can contaminate you?”

“Jim,” called the woman from the car. “Tell them about my brother.”

Jim turned back to us. “My wife’s brother owns a vacation home here.”

“He’s living here now?”

“No. He was in New York with his family when the crash came. We haven’t heard from him since.” His voice softened into those pleading tones again. “Don’t you see? We wouldn’t beg a place to stay, we could move into my brother-in-law’s cabin. I know how to weld… look!” Suddenly eager, he gripped the gate bars with his two hands and gave it a shake. “I could make this even stronger. I could make it so strong it would keep an army out. You need to weld reinforcing bars diagonally across the-”

“Sorry.” The ex-chief spoke gently. He sounded genuinely regretful. “I truly am sorry. I can’t permit you to enter the town. You look like good people, but we just don’t know if you’re carrying the disease.”

“So you’re going to turn us away, and leave us to starve?”

The officers looked at each other; then the ex-chief spoke again. “We can give you food and medicine if you know what your wife needs.”

“I don’t know what drugs she needs. I need a doctor to see her. Hey, listen… listen!”

But the three officers moved back to our group. I glanced at Ben. His expression revealed that the incident sickened him. He had a good heart. If you ask me, he’d have allowed the family in.

The stranger returned to the car, spoke in an agitated way to his wife, then came back to the gate to yell, “We’re not moving, do you hear? We’re going to sit outside these gates until we starve to death or you let us in. Did you hear me? Did you?”

The ex-chief spoke to a couple of guards. “Bring them some food, boys. Pack it in fish crates so we can shove it through the gap under the gate.”

Sergeants dismissed us from guard duty; the idea was we’d return to our own jobs, but most of us hung ’round, not enjoying what we were seeing but feeling as if we somehow had to see it out.

Returning to his car, the stranger sat on the hood. Inside his family must have cooked in the heat of the car’s interior, but they weren’t quitting the standoff yet. Clearly, the guy thought we’d cave. That we wouldn’t stand here and watch the pregnant woman suffer.

After a while a truck returned with the wooden fish crates into which dried foodstuff and cans had been packed. Using broom handles so as not to get too close to the strangers and so risk possible infection, a couple of guards slid the crates through the gap under the fence in the direction of the strangers’ car.

We sweated it out for hours. At one point the guy tried to climb the gate, but there was so much barbed wire coiling ’round the bars, he didn’t make it halfway to the top before he had to slither down again. The boy came up to the gate to call at us, “Let us in. Let us in. My mom’s sick. Let us in!” And so on for a good twenty minutes. The woman looked tired and a kind of quiet resignation rotted the expression on her face. Later the guy cried. They sat in front of the car hugging each other. It was about that time the woman started saying something to the guy. For a while he shook his head, then he started to nod.

When next he climbed out of the car he never even looked at us. Nor did we look directly at him. There was something embarrassing about the situation now. No one made eye contact. No one spoke. For the next ten minutes the boy and the man loaded the car with food, then quickly they climbed back in, and the engine fired into life. Without even so much as a reproachful glance the family drove off into the distance to whatever hazardous future waited for them out there.

A shame-filled silence hung over us. It took a while, but eventually we returned to the trucks for the drive back to town.

Some invasion.

That night after the heat of the day it felt good to work on my mother and sister’s tomb. Cool air. Cool stone against my palms. It was good to be alone, too. As I worked on my three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle-my goddam obsession, as Ben had dubbed it-I couldn’t help but think about the family we’d turned away. I guess the woman might wind up losing the baby. She might even lose her own life with it. There’d be the man and the boy with the screaming woman in a lonely cabin in the woods. I slotted a cube of rock into the tomb structure. It fitted as neatly as a plug into its socket. I patted it down the final inch or so with the palm of my hand.

I immediately picked up another chunk of rock. This had a more complicated shape, with seven sides. With luck it would stop me thinking about the family.

But it wasn’t easy. What if we’d relented? Let them in. What if a few hours later that knot of tension came into my belly? That alarm signal at some deep, deep animal level that said: Beware, Valdiva, you’ve got yourself a batch of Jumpies here. Kill them before it’s too late…

So what’s worse, Valdiva? Turning the family away to maybe die a lingering death out in the woods? Or finishing them all with a few savage blows with the ax?

Some cousin of that instinct that gave me the ability to divine when a person was infected with Jumpy also identified the perfect-shaped void in the wall for the lump of rock I rolled ’round in my hands. In it went. Snick. Perfect fit.

I stood back to look at the tomb. There it was, the size of a truck, a perfect square, gleaming like cream in the starlight.

An old woman once walked down here as I worked.

She complimented me on my labors and said the structure reminded her of an ancient Egyptian tomb called a Mastaba. Mastabas, she said, were used to entomb Egyptian dead long before they built the Pyramids. I don’t know anything about that. Instinct told me to build it that way. Like instinct told me when a person was hot with Jumpy. I didn’t think or plan what to do. I only acted on instinct. And if God or the Devil shaped that instinct, I don’t know. That’s just the way it was.

Stars shone brighter than diamonds. I sat with my back to the tomb, feeling the cool stone through my shirt back. Even though it was close on two in the morning I didn’t feel like sleeping. That cabin of mine could be a lonely place; somehow it felt less lonely up here on the bluff by the graves of Chelle and Mom. Here, I counted shooting stars. “Wow, Chelle, did you see the size of that one?”

I bit my lip. It was so easy to believe they were sitting beside me, alive and breathing and singing out “Oooh” and “Aaah” when a fiery blue meteor came crackling through the atmosphere sixty miles above our heads.

Still biting my lip hard, I looked out across the lake. It had a silvery look tonight, yet somehow mixed with a lot of darkness. Glints of starlight reflected on the water before slowly vanishing, to be replaced by a great gulf of blackness that looked as dark as death itself. I imagined myself running to the end of the bluff and diving the twenty feet down into the water. Down, down, down… swimming through clouds of bubbles, through swarms of fish that would move with a metallic glitter. In my mind’s eye I saw myself swimming across the rocks, around clumps of weeds, over the rotting bones of sunken boats. I imagined swimming right away across the lake underwater on one gulp of air. There I’d climb out onto the harbor wall at Lewis.

Suddenly it seemed the most desirable thing in the world to get away from this claustrophobic town. The stores and cinemas and supermarkets across the lake might be smashed to crud, but it would be a real taste of freedom. There was an aura about Sullivan these days that pushed my mood down into a dark place. It was the same kind of feeling you got when you walked into an old folks’ home. You sensed it was a place where life hung by a thread. That, there, all the people looked backward to the past. That they had no future. No fun. Nothing but the slippered creep, creep of death getting closer and closer.

Maybe I wasn’t far from the truth. Most of Sullivan’s population was elderly. They’d only survived because they’d stayed put in this out-of-the-way place. And stay put they did. The poster warning people not to leave the island was a joke because no one had been away from it in the last six months. Fishermen never went past the orange buoys that market the two-hundred-yard line from shore. No one went hunting in the forest that stretched out into the mainland proper beyond the isthmus. Hell, no one had looked over the nearest hill for months. Someone could have built a new Disneyland there and we’d be none the wiser.

I’d been half asleep as I allowed those thoughts to run through my head. The grass was soft there; the night air could have been an all-enveloping comforter. So when I saw the light it didn’t register.

I watched it in that disconnected mental state. Not even asking myself who the hell was shining a light across the lake in that ghost town.

The yellow light showed as nothing more than a spark. It could have been a star that had somehow tumbled from the sky to rest in one of the ruined buildings.

It moved.

This did bring my head up. I stared, feeling a tingle spread across my skin.

Someone was across there in Sullivan. He was shining a light; a small lamp or even a candle, I don’t know. But it was steady enough. It didn’t look like starlight reflected by a window. It moved again. Now it disappeared, then reappeared, as if someone unseen carried the light through what remained of one of the buildings.

Sure. There were people out there. We’d seen strangers today. But this was the first time I’d seen a light in Lewis. Normally even strangers stayed away from the ruined town. It was as if people had a gut feeling that told them the place was contaminated, or even that it was lousy with ghosts.

The light moved higher. Disappeared.

Gone.

It’s not coming back, I told myself. They’ve left.

But then the light reappeared. This time it was at a higher level. I pictured the ruined waterfront buildings I’d seen through a ’scope. They’d stood up to six stories tall. Now it looked as if someone had set a light in one of the shattered windows to burn there as a signal to us across the lake. Not that anyone from Sullivan would take a damn shred of notice of it, never mind dare making the trip across to the ghost town.

Then I thought something insane. I decided to take a boat over there myself. It didn’t make sense. All I might find was a pack of bread bandits who’d break my skull. Or maybe I’d be find someone who’d infect me with Jumpy. But that insane notion blazed inside my head. Go there, Valdiva. Anything to get out of this hole for a few hours.

At this time of night there’d be no one to see me slip one of the cruisers from its mooring. I’d be in Lewis in twenty minutes. By starlight I followed the path down from the bluff, through the trees to the jetty. There, the boats sat so still on the water you’d swear that the lake had become as hard as onyx. There were cruisers with big hunky motors that could fly me across the lake in minutes. But the noise they’d make at this time of night would wake a skeleton.

I opted for the smaller tourist cruisers. These harked back to the time that the town council started taking green issues seriously and encouraged boat rental businesses to bring in boats with electric motors rather than the old internal combustion engines. They weren’t fast, but they were whisper quiet. I knew the batteries would be charged because Peter Gerletz and his daughters used them as fishing boats. I even borrowed one every now and again to collect driftwood where it beached on a sandbar a hundred yards off-shore.

Taking careful steps, I moved down the jetty, hearing the mousy squeak of timbers shifting under my feet.

“That you, Gerletz? It’s OK, I’m not stealing your precious boats.” It was the voice of the old police chief coming from the shadows. I stepped forward to see him sitting on the jetty boards with his back to a mooring post. He looked relaxed. No wonder; I saw a bottle of whiskey on the boards beside him. Well, a third of a bottle, to be more precise. A shot glass sat neatly beside the bottle.

“Gerletz, don’t worry. Go back to sleep. I’m guarding your damn boats tonight.”

“It’s not Peter Gerletz,” I said.

“Who then? Not one of my ghosts come to haunt me?” I heard a soft laugh as he poured a splash of whiskey into the shot glass.

“It’s Greg Valdiva.”

“Oh, the outsider?” He swallowed the shot in one. “But it’s not fair to call you an outsider now, is it? You’ve been here… what? Six months?”

“Eight.”

“Eight? As long as that?”

He groaned a bone-weary groan as he made himself more comfortable against the post. “So, what brings you down here? A midnight swim?”

“No.” I could hardly say I intended to break one of the Caucus’s shiny-new laws. Instead I shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Ah, Valdiva, you’re one of the guard, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So you saw that sorry spectacle today?”

I nodded.

“You know, that really works against my grain, Valdiva. I swore to uphold law and order and protect the innocent. I’ve still got my badge and I still clean it with complete and sincere pride.”

“We had no choice. We had to refuse them entry.”

“Especially after last week. When that blue-eyed American boy.. .” He merely gestured with the glass instead of finishing the sentence. “It seems that damn bug can get into our blood, too. No one’s immune, isn’t that so?”

“I guess.”

“You guess right, my friend. But even so. What happened today just didn’t seem right. That pregnant lady? She needed our help. But we just told them to shove off. That sticks in my craw. I say if we’re going to go down with a case of Jumpy we might as well get it over with, because we’re only postponing the inevitable by hiding away here.”

“You’re going to tell the Caucus that?”

He looked up as if seeing me properly for the first time. “Valdiva. You speak your mind, don’t you? As well as being our town executioner… Pardon me, you didn’t need reminding of that. Jack Daniel’s always did loosen my tongue past the point where my diplomatic side becomes a mere speck on the horizon…” He seemed to lose the thread for a while. He charged his glass again, then downed it in one. “Here I am like some old wino. I busted plenty of those when I first joined the force. Hell, the smell of their pee followed you home. It got so Mary made me change out of my uniform in the garage. We even had a shower installed in the utility room there. ‘Get out of those clothes,’ she’d say, ‘you’ve been hauling in drunks again. I can smell the pee on your jacket.’ ” He chuckled. “That’s why I refuse to drink this whiskey out of the bottle like a bum. I’m drinking it out of a glass like an officer and a gentleman.” He poured another shot. “The answer to your question, Valdiva, is no. I won’t be telling the Caucus that Sullivan here is a hopeless case… a terminal patient waiting for the inevitable. That we’re all going to contract that damn disease one day. We are, but I won’t tell them that. I have what you might call such a strong sense of duty it’s pathological. So I’ll do my hardest to do the right thing for our community. Even if I sometimes think-privately, mind-it stinks… stinks of something brown and wet. Now, sir, can I interest you in a glass of this?”

“No thanks. I just needed some air. I’m going to turn in.”

“Good night, Valdiva. I hope you sleep better than I will.”

“Good night, Mr. Finch.”

I’d started walking back along the jetty when he called out again. “Valdiva, do yourself a favor.” I looked back at him sitting there, pouring himself another whiskey. “Get away from here. It’s useless advice, I know. But this town is going to start getting unhealthy. And I’m not talking about any disease here. I don’t know what it is, that’s the funny thing. But when I walk ’round and look in my neighbors’ faces I start getting a bad taste in my mouth.”

“What do you think might be wrong?”

“I don’t know. Something just isn’t right. So if I were you, I’d get right away from here… as far as you can. Call it cop instinct.” He picked up the bottle as if to read the label. “Aw, what do I know?” He smiled and seemed to step up the amiable old drunk act, as if he’d suddenly had second thoughts and didn’t want me to take what he’d said at all seriously. “Forget it, Valdiva. It’s just the whiskey talking. You get yourself a good night’s sleep. There’s nothing to worry about.”

There’s nothing to worry about. I tended to believe everything the old cop told me. But I didn’t believe that last comment. There’s nothing to worry about.

With the man’s lie echoing inside my skull I walked home.