She cringed at the memory. The past embarrassed her almost every day. Had there ever been a time when she wasn’t stoned-cold exhausted? Or just stoned? And other people’s meanness had made her mean. She tried to remember Serena. What she looked like. How it had felt, holding her. Squirmy. A squirmy thing. A smile like no other. She ran her fingers through her own stringy hair. She had not been a good mama, even before the troubles.
What had she done?
What the hell had she done?
What on God’s good earth had she done?
Not your fault, she heard her own mama say. You sick. You need help.
Not every mama is a saint. Ava could say, with hindsight, that hers should be beatified. On the Mexican Day of the Dead, they should build monuments in her name. Fuck Jesús Malverde. Stupid little prick of a drug dealer. Beat the drums and blow the horns for Mama.
She went to the console and played with the cameras. She admitted: guilty. I should have gone with the clown to see what the sensors picked up. Would he have allowed me to go off like that, by myself? Maybe. Maybe. But she had told him to let them be. Why was it on him to keep the lost ones from a foothold in a place that had nothing to offer anyway? Let them find out for themselves. America, home of the predators and the corrupt, born in genocide and slavery and now returning to those roots. The bad guys prevailed. No more truth, no more justice, no more American way.
We should be going after crooks, she thought, not cooks.
She gathered her things, stuffed her duffel. She grunted at the mess. The Jeep outside had to be returned to the mother ship in town. More a fort than a town, she thought. If she tried to get to North Dakota or Tulsa in it, they would apprehend her and that would be that. Even the tires had sensors. She would have to find a slammer good enough to get her to some destination—Tulsa first, she decided—without a breakdown and sturdy enough to keep going in the cold after she made it home. Or the bus. There was always a bus.
Home. Now there’s a word. It sounded very strange. Home.
Where the heart is.
What if you don’t have a heart?
She pulled out her phone and used an app to figure that Tulsa was more than eleven hundred miles away. If she found nothing there, it was another eight hundred miles to Fargo. Fargo was also a sanctuary, as far as she could tell. Low crime.
The cold, she remembered. Keeps out the riffraff.
If she couldn’t find Serena, though, truth was she had no idea what she could do when she got there except sit tight someplace, sling hash at a diner, do her best to stay clean, and think things through. Stay straight.
It was disheartening. How life slips away. The whole goddamned whirligig.
Goddamn it, she thought, I’m going home. Or someplace, anyway.
She took the phone out of her pocket. It was fully charged. She had kept track of things. Her junkie days were gone, though she was aware that the siren call of opioids would forever be her fate.
Once a junkie, always a junkie, she thought.
But not today.
When the desire came to score, the best place to be was the middle of nowhere. She would be on guard every hour of each day. I’m a friend of Bill, she thought, but I would never marry the guy. Booze is also my friend. The routine of staying clean could also kill. She looked across the table at the glass full of vodka.
Irresistible urges pass.
She sat still until this one did. It became a ghost someplace in the room and left her more exhausted than ever. God, she wanted to sleep.
She hit the dial button. She punched in the number she knew by heart, the one she had never forgotten except maybe on her worst days. And worst years.
She listened to the void, to a signal making its way up north. Or not, she thought. She still had hope. She was almost happy as she listened to the phone ring.
And ring. Until it stopped. “Number out of service,” a robot voice said.
It was time to go. She didn’t know if it was time to go someplace or just to go, hit the road, go for the sake of going. Life didn’t feel like much fun anymore. But it wasn’t time for it to end. Just go.
PART FOUR
Tulsa
Build Me a House
Serena couldn’t wait to get to Tulsa, to know the place, feel its vibe, walk the downtown neighborhoods where massacres had occurred but would never take place again. She could honor the dead, her own and theirs; explore museums that celebrated Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan; gyrate at the famous club, Cain’s, still in business after all these years, more than a century old but by all reports still going strong. She would stare at the downtown Art Deco architecture while eating the wonderful fried okra a friend told her was the best thing she ever tasted. “Fried okra?” she had replied, bemused.
The old Greenwood neighborhood, where the massacre happened so long ago, was now one of many enclaves downtown, an area with an actual police force populated by men and women of all races who actually protected and served. The city was self-contained, she understood, had groceries and drugstores and a hospital and a school and all the mom-and-pop businesses needed to find work. The Marauders were kept at bay. The Militias respected the boundaries. There was festivity, fantasy, lives well lived. It was paradise compared to Fargo or almost anyplace else.
So she had heard.
That was the myth anyway, one she took to heart. And she decided to believe it, come hell or high water, because it made spiritual sense and gave her the push needed to hit the road. She had given up on finding her mother—Ava, she thought, Ava, the palindrome, same from the back or the front. Now she yearned to find her place and stay in it until her itchy feet calmed down.
She endured the long journey over bad roads still passable but no longer maintained in the back of a van with worn shocks and no windows, reluctantly accepting the lack of a view in return for the cheap ride. The van belonged to Wander, a self-described and bumptious nomad, a round-cheeked woman with thick-lensed black-framed eyeglasses and cloudy eyes who was too old for the dyed black hair and pigtails she wore. The van traveled in a caravan with a dozen other vehicles: trucks and trailers, ancient RVs hobbling along, a sedan or two outfitted with sufficient care to call home. Wander was ancient too, with those cataracts she claimed made it difficult to drive, but she allowed nobody else behind the wheel, even though two others, impulsive exiles like Serena, though younger, sat in front with Wander babbling to one another about boys and trinkets. They were sisters, Wander had said, relatives she was bound by blood to help. “Nobody knows the roads or how to drive ’em like me,” she said, “but the potholes are murder, aren’t they? Upkeep ain’t what it used to be.”
Serena half listened, sometimes dozing, through a small open rectangle with a sliding plastic window in the steel partition that separated cabin from living quarters. Two old people, probably in their eighties, who told Serena they were called Man and Woman, were dressed in multiple layers of clothing even when the caravan left the upper Midwest and temperatures climbed. They slept and snored beside her on a narrow mattress and woke only to warm thin gruel in a charred pot on a butane stove that Serena expected might explode any minute. The woman, her eyes slits, nodded to Serena and lay back down to doze again. “We’re nomads!” she shouted, sitting up, eyes glassy with wonder, possibly talking while asleep. “Broke from the nursing home where they put us like meat to spoil and die. Free as birds.” A snore escaped. “Free as birds,” she murmured. And rolled over against her partner.
“Good for you,” Serena said, wondering how they would make do in Tulsa. If they can do it, she thought, I can too. She had left everything behind except a small duffel of clothes and a one-person tent, a backpack with her pistol in it, and some keepsakes in the duffel to help remember Nana.
Good riddance to Fargo, she thought. So long, been good to know you. She said it with spite and venom, but her heart ached with desolation. Her stomach growled. The gruel disgusted her. Like eating warm toothpaste from a tube. She could smell manure, lots of it—was it the gruel?—and one of the girls up front made a yuck-yuck shout. She couldn’t see much through the small opening, but it didn’t take good eyes to understand thousands of heads of cattle crowded together in conditions that made her retch.
A concentration camp for cows, she thought. What would Nana say?
The stockyards were well guarded. The girls commented on the many rifles pointed their way as they drove past under dark skies. The caravan drivers kept in touch with phones and old walkie-talkies; there was lots of chatter until they passed the Militias. “Smell that shit? Whoo-ee!” “Keep your weapons cocked and loaded, everybody. Just in case. Easy does it.” “Militia standing down by the roadside. Easy does it, folks.”
