We stayed for another fifteen minutes—long enough for five more girls to come out for the men’s inspection. Two of them they considered and ultimately waved off. Two were invited into the camper. Another one—she had a club foot and a long scar running down her face—well, the men chased her off, making barking sounds. A boy came out. Ten or eleven, I’d guess now. Clad in jean shorts, thin chest bare, bare feet. The men booed. One tossed his empty liquor bottle at him. “Fuck off!” a man yelled. I could hear it clear as day from where Daddy and I hid.
I got a better look at the small person from the RV, the one who collected the bills for each transaction. A child. A girl, I think, though she moved too quickly to see for sure. Grubby, also barefoot. Hair hanging in her eyes. At the RV, she’d do a little jump and get the door open and slide herself inside in one swift motion. On one trip she caught her foot on the step and fell forward. Busted her face on the door, and the men howled with laughter. How they laughed. The door opened, and a set of arms came out, took the child up by the wrists so that she was dangling—both her wrists in one huge hand—and paddled her bottom. More laughs from the men. The door closed. The RV pulled off, and the men who hadn’t made a selection returned to their lawn chairs and their drinks.
After this, I turned to Daddy. I looked him in the eyes. It felt like the first time I’d looked my father in the eye. Really looked, I mean. And though he’d told me not to talk, I said, real soft, “I want to go,” and he only nodded.
We made it back to the woods, to the road, to our bicycles hidden in the thicket off the side of the highway. I pedaled back the way we’d come twice as fast as I’d pedaled coming to, and my father fell behind.
Back at our camp, he talked to me as we loaded the bikes back into the wagon. He said that the campsite in Flat Rock had been there over a decade that he knew of, and there were others like it. He said that terrible things happened there. A few I’d seen. Many I hadn’t.
“That child,” he said to me. “The one who collected the money.”
“What about her?” is what I said.
“They’re usually children of the girls. Like the ones you saw,” he said. He was talking about the prostitutes. He said, “They put them to work just about as soon as they can walk. The ones that child’s age, they call them squirrels. What you saw—that’s the least of how it can be. How bad it can get for them.”
I motioned to the tent. I said, “You think she was a squirrel.”
“I do,” Daddy said.
“And you wanted me to just turn around and put her back where I found her.”
His face got real grave. Stony. He said, “They don’t let people go. And if they’re done with someone, they kill them. They don’t drop ’em off like puppies on the side of the road. She must’ve run away, and if she did, someone’s looking for her.”
“For a burnt-up, broke-down kid?” is what I asked.
“For their property,” Daddy said. “They’ll make an example out of her. So no one else will try what she tried.”
I wasn’t foolish. I told you that. I looked around at what we had. Our camp. The wagon with the bikes and the clean water and the changes of clothes. Daddy’s lab, all that good, world-saving work he was doing. My mother—I could hear her warm voice through the tent wall, see her silhouette, her thin shoulders and long neck leaned over, a book open in her hands, the child a dark mound on the floor beside her. I could see what he was trying to protect.
But what I said out loud to him was, “I wonder at the fact that you could show me all that and expect I’d do anything but protect her.”
He said, “You shouldn’t. Wonder. Because you’re everything to me and your mother, and that child’s nothing to us.” He said, “When you have one of your own, you’ll understand.”
I bet that’s one y’all have heard a time or two. When you have kids.
He said, “I’d give up what soul I’ve supposedly got to keep you safe. Without a second thought.”
I understand him better now than I did then. Because of Violet. Which is funny, if you think about it.
Well, you’ve seen Violet. There isn’t any suspense on that account. My ultimatum stood. It was going to be both of us or neither of us—and Daddy chose both. She became part of our family from that day forward, and no one from the Flat Rock campsite ever showed up looking for her. Or not that we saw, anyhow, since we kept hunkered down as we always had, never settling in one place for long, never approaching strangers. There came a day when Violet went looking for them. The bastards at Flat Rock, I mean. But again, that’s another story for another time.
You have a lot of questions, maybe. Well, so do I. I don’t know how Daddy knew all that he knew about that place. I guess I didn’t want to know. And I don’t know everything that Violet endured there, but I’m just as happy to be spared that, too. She hardly spoke to us for a full year after we took her in. She grunted. Made hand signals. Would mumble a couple of words, saving them up for about a second shy of the point you’d decided to take her for empty-headed. But she sure wasn’t telling us her life story, and by the time she was talking on the regular, her memories were pretty spotty, or she claimed they were. We let her be.
I’ll claim the last swallow of Vic’s brew for myself. Talked till my throat’s raw. I think I’ve earned it.
Even after you’ve heard Violet’s story, there’s a look in your eyes. I know it well. And all I can say to it is that what you want to hate about her—her ugliness and her meanness—you created. Yes, each of you. You’re complicit in the acts of evil that made her who she is. You’re complicit because you’ve let yourself be comforted by lies. You’re complicit because all of those comforts you have in-zone come at a price, and Violet is one of many of us who’ve paid the bill.
You want to argue with me. But you don’t. There’s a lesson in this. Sleep on it tonight.
You don’t argue with the ones holding the guns.
June held up a hand and Vic grabbed it, pulling her to a stand. Wes sensed that this was a performance of age, a way to humanize her, make her kindly. He suspected that June, when it counted, needed no help springing to action.
“Well,” she said. “That ended on an unfriendly note.” She laughed. She brushed her bottom off briskly. She pointed. “Tonight we’ll gather at the river, as the old song goes. We’re smoking two pigs for y’all. That’s about as friendly as it comes, you ask me. You’ll be able to meet our people. We’re good people.”
Wendy coughed.
“We’re good people,” June repeated more softly. “Any rate, you have the afternoon. Rest up. Keep to Town Hall. If you go off wandering, one of your minders will escort you back.”
She and Vic left. The battered remnants of the OLE group—Wes, Marta, Edie, Jesse, Anastasia, Berto, Lee, Tia, Wendy, and Ken—exchanged glances, dazed.
“Not that any of you has the gumption to form an escape plan,” Andy said. “But I’d advise against it. Randall and I will be right outside.”
They left. Then—for the first time in what felt like weeks—there was silence. Enough quiet for Wes to hear the roar of his own blood flow. We can’t waste this time, he thought. We mustn’t. There might not be another moment like this one. Another opportunity to talk, unwatched.
Marta was clutching something in her fist. Staring at her hand, as if she couldn’t believe what was there. Wes lifted his brow.
She opened her fingers. Just a Smokeless. Still shrink-wrapped in its Canteen box.