Page 32 of Road Refugees

Chapter Eleven

Heaven

I had no idea what I was getting into!

But it signaled the beginning of the rest of my life. The swelling and pounding in my chest when I laid eyes on that man again—it really scared me, because I’d never felt anything similar. Looking at men usually translated into indifference at best, or terror in the lowest realms of existence.

I’d run into Slappy when he came into The Hip Quiver, the indoor archery range Arkie—I mean Sock Monkey—ran. I’d been hanging around there a lot just to catch up and bask in his presence. Family. I mean blood family. Brighten had always tried to teach me about the meaning of family. In our world, being holy didn’t really mean you had a close relationship with God. No, Brighten said you had to make meaningful gestures of love and fidelity. This obedience was created by affection and devotion. On earth, she said, as well as in heaven, we make important bonds by what we do with and for other people.

That was a rule I could get behind, as they say. I’d never practiced that well in Cornucopia just because I was so messed up most of the time, either walking toward or racing away from Orson Ream. Now I was determined to enact it afresh, starting with my blood brother. I was helping Sock Monkey for free at the range, and it was one of the most joyous—if not the most joyous—time of my life.

In came people like Roman Serpico, a rock star turned Bare Boner who always had the grip of a Sig Sauer sticking out in the waistband of his tight jeans. He loved archery and even shot with a stick bow, the hardest type to sight in. The ganjier August came from A Joint System, although Sock Monkey wouldn’t let anyone shoot if even slightly buzzed or stoned.

That presented a problem for me, because I found that my proclivity for staying pleasantly tipsy had followed me from Cornucopia. Although I was pretty sure Orson wouldn’t pop out from behind a paper target and grab me, I still liked to drink all the time. It settled the jittery nerves I’d possessed since my parents sent me away to Cornucopia—or even before. I found a solution that wasn’t a hundred percent easy for me, but I so longed to help Arkie. I’d awaken on Sally’s couch and immediately go to The Hip Quiver to open up. It was fairly easy to refrain from drink while I taught kids archery, repaired bows, or shot alongside the likes of Baron Funkhauser, one of the Boners who had saved my ass in Flagstaff. I was accustomed to these extreme types at the fundamentalist compound, so they didn’t scare me.

All kinds came into the archery range. I met Maddy, the old lady of the Prez, a registered nurse. I even talked a bit with Slushy, Roman’s father-in-law and the club lawyer who maintained an office in the back of the range’s shop. It was shadowy where Slushy had taken his law degree—the University of Puerto Rico, Sock Monkey said, laughing—but he seemed to have an active and normal lifestyle, complete with buying kale at the farmer’s market, reading the Sunday New York Times, and eating Asian fusion food, whatever that was.

I talked with Slushy, casually mentioning my old dream of becoming a lawyer.

“Well,” he said, hanging his bow on the bow rack. “You’re the cute one of this group, when I look around at Sock Monkey and this baboon Roman.”

“Hey!” shouted Roman, letting loose another arrow at the wall.

Slushy continued, “I’d say you can make it. What sort of lawyer? Tax? Property? Inheritance?”

“Well, lately I was thinking of corporate.”

Slushy splayed his hands against his chest. “Corporate? Like me? I don’t need an assistant, little girl. I’m their Tom Hagen.”

“I was thinking more like the construction end of things, the Illuminati Trucking enterprise. Up in Cornucopia I used to hear talk about mining accidents all the time. I’d like to protect workers.”

For some reason this made Slushy pause. He looked impish in his fluorescent green button-down shirt, a bad combover tickling his forehead. “For real? Because I can tell you where to ‘study’ just so you can charge five hundred an hour to cause a mistrial.”

I laughed but wasn’t sure if he was serious or not. I’d have to make sure to search his walls next time I was in his office, see if he had a framed degree up there. “Yes, for real. And I don’t mean University of Phoenix.”

Slushy screwed up his face and stroked his chin. “Hm. I’ve heard good things about the Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law, but that’s in Tempe. That would be the top one if you wanted to make an impression. But working for Illuminati Trucking? Remember. Perfection is the enemy of perfectly adequate.”

I nodded. “You’re saying just go to community college and Ford will hire me?”

“Nailed it! Or online. Everything’s online nowadays. And it’d be Tuzigoot. That O.G. runs the Citadel now, all the construction ops. Maddy made Ford make a choice. Her or the construction company. He’s still allowed to do club business.”

“Oh,” I said, taken aback. All this time, and I could’ve just done a correspondence course to become a lawyer?

“Why don’t we get together after you get off here, have a hibiscus iced tea.”

But it was my quitting time, too, so I begged off.

Slushy’s last words were, “Hey, what do you get when you cross the Godfather with a lawyer? An offer you can’t understand!”

I liked to go fill up my flask with brandy and take Sock Monkey’s cage out to a mesa where there were alleged vortices. I knew the Bare Bones scoffed at such things, but I found a certain comfort in it, especially around sunset. True, hippies dotted the sandstone monoliths, and someone was always asking me for a cig, but I’d found a couple of nice rust-red formations I could hide behind, drink, and think about life.

I thought a lot about Town, to be honest. After hours of deep reflection, I decided there was no way his kindness could be fake. I would notice! For example, I believed Brighten to be basically a moral, sweet-hearted person, although I’d seen her slap one of her kids, and she tore all of us a new orifice after someone broke her Lenox turkey platter and no one would say who. (It was me.) Brighten rarely failed to stand up to my image of her as a fundamentally decent person.

My parents, now that I looked back on it, had been angling to get rid of me for a long time. We never went anywhere as a family, and they bought far more things for Arkie than me. I was on my own in the world, attempting to figure things out since I was ten. My mother would lock the doors on me, so I would sleep in people’s cars. I never had money for schoolbooks. I was lucky my best friend would lie to her mother she’d lost hers, and her mother would buy her new ones so I could take the old ones.

My mother called me a whore when I was merely dating a few guys who were polite with me, barely ever kissing me unless I gave overt signs I wanted it—which was hardly ever. Sure, I made a mistake with the one guy who knocked me up. He turned out to be a dirtbag of the highest order when I told him I was pregnant. But my parents didn’t make it any better by sending me to that charlatan to be cleansed, taking all my womanly innards with it.

There are visions that only come to you when you’re reflecting on things, and I had many of them on those mountains.