"I guess the Troupe was pretty lucky that you ended up g them," Alex said.
"No," said Ellen Mae, "there wasn't anything like luck to that."
AFTER JERRY AND Sam had pored over the forecast, and Joe Brasseur had run through a legal database of likely areas to squat, they picked a destination and announced a route.
The Troupe broke camp.
Joe Brasseur, the oldest member of the Troupe, had once referred to breaking camp as "labor-intensive." Jane found that a hilariously old-fashioned term, but she understood what it meant, all right-there was no way to shrug the work off onto machines, so everybody involved just plain had to sweat.
The Troupe pulled up all the carpets, beat a hundred kilos of dust out of them, and rolled them up neatly. They deflated the bubblepak, and rolled that up too. Peter, Martha, and Rick deftly unstacked the towers-a nerve-racking business to watch-while Greg and Carol and Mickey went after the instrumentation and the wind generator.
Then there were the tepees and the yurts to strip, collapse, and pack, and the systems to shut down and uncable and stow away. And then there would be the bonfire, and the last big meal in camp, and the ritual bath... . Jane pitched in headlong. She felt good after a day off, she felt alert and strong. There was a lot to do, but she knew how to do it. She was ready to work, and she would do it in one daylong blur of harnessed nervous energy, and when it was over, she would sleep in the Troupe bus in the moving dark, and she would feel very satisfied.
She was hauling a bundled stack of tepee poles to one of the trucks when she saw Alex slouching past her.
She scarcely recognized her brother at first: a strange, hunched, gnomelike figure, less like a Troupe wannabe than some kind of prisoner of war. He was wearing a dirty paper jumpsuit, a big cardboard-and-paper sombrero, with a big white mask elastic-strapped over his nose and mouth.
He was carrying a large double-headed digging pick.
She'd never seen anyone carry a pick with less enthusiasm- Alex was lugging it clumsily, thigh-high, at the end of his outstretched arms, as if it were some kind of barbell.
He trudged slowly out of the camp. Jane called out to him, waved, then jogged over and caught up to him just past one of the camp's perimeter posts.
"What's on your mind?" he muttered.
"Just wanted to see how you're doing," she sai4. She looked into his pale, squinting eyes. "You mind taking off that mask for a second?"
Alex pulled his mask down, with bad grace. The mask's thin elastic straps had left four little stripes of pale skin across his sunburned cheeks. "Ellen Mae wants me to dig up a root."
"Oh." Jane thought that Alex looked shaky, and she was pretty sure he'd never touched a pickax in his life. "Are you up to that kind of labor? You just got out of a hospital.
"I'm not gonna work very hard," he told her patiently. "It's just makework bullshit. Ellen Mae's just getting me out of the way so one of those big radio towers won't fall on my head."
"You got along all right with Ellen Mae?"
"I can get along.' Alex sighed. "These people of yours are really something. They remind me of some Santeria people I used to know, in a rancho outside Matamoros. Kind of survivalist compound thing? They had the bunkers, y'know, and the security systems and stuff... . Of course, those dope vaqueros were a much heavier outfit than these jokers." Alex thumped the broadside of the pick against the base of one of the perimeter posts. "This thing can't listen to us talking, can it?"
"Well, yeah, it can," Jane admitted, "but we never record any speech with it. It's just an intruder alarm, with some tasers and pellets and stuff. We can talk."
"No problem," Alex muttered, watching- a pack of Troupers strip the paper walls from the hangar yurt. "Well, you don't have to worry about me. Run along and go do something useful."
"Is anybody bugging you, Alex? Rick or Peter or anybody?"
Alex shrugged. "You're bugging me."
"Don't be that way. I just want to help you fit in."
Alex laughed. "Look! You kidnapped me here, I didn't ask to come. I'm sunburned and covered with mosquito bites, and I'm really dirty. The food stinks here. There's not enough water. There's no privacy. It's dangerous! I'm wearing clothes made of paper. Your friends are a pack of hicks and loans, except for your boyfriend, who's a big cigar-store Indian. Under the circumstances, I'm being a really good sport about this."
Jane said nothing.
He looked her in the eye. "Stop worrying so much. I'm not gonna do anything stupid. If I were a bigger guy, and a stronger guy, and a nicer guy, I'd go have it out with your boyfriend about that way you've been groaning at night." He shook his head, under the big paper hat. "I won't, though. I think I know what kind of guy Mulcahey is, and I think you're crazy to hook up with a guy like that. But hey, I'm not one to judge. That's your life, that's all your decision."
"Thanks a lot," she grated.
He smiled at her. "You're really happy here, aren't you?"
She was surprised.
"I've seen you act really crazy sometimes, Janey. And I still think you're acting pretty strange. But I've never seen you act so happy before." He smiled again. "You're chasing tornadoes in a wasteland! But you're waltzin' around here with a smile on your lips, and a song in your heart, and your little bouquet of fresh wildflowers. -...t's kind of sweet, actually."
Jane straightened to her full height and looked down at him. "Yes, Alex, I'm happy here. About everything but you, basically."
"You really belong with these people. You really like them."
"That's right. They're my people."
Alex narrowed his eyes. "And this guy you're with. He treats you all right? He wasn't beating you or anything really sick and twisted, was he?"
Jane looked around for eavesdroppers, smoldering with rage, then centered her eyes on him. "No. He doesn't beat me. I was fucking him. I like to flick him. Hard! Loud! A lot! I'm not ashamed about it, and you can't make me ashamed!" There was a hot flush in her cheeks and ears.
"Get this through your head! That is the man in my life!
He is my grand passion." She stared hard at Alex, until he dropped his gaze.
"I never thought I was gonna have a grand passion," she told him. "I didn't ever believe in that. I thought it was Hollywood fantasy, or something from a hundred years ago. But I have a grand passion now, and he's the one. There'll never be another man like him for me~ Ever!"
Alex took a step back. "Okay, okay."
"It's him and me till theaky falls in!"
Alex nodded quickly, his eyes wide. "Okay, I get it, Janey. Calm down."
"I am calm, you little creep. And it's no joke. You can't ever make it a joke, because you don't know one thing about it. I love him, and I'm happy with him, and we do what we do, and we are what we are, and you just better live with that! And you bettet never forget what I just told you.
Alex nodded. She could tell from the way he bit his lip that her words had sunk in-for better or worse, she'd connected. "It's okay, Janey. I'm not complaining. I'm glad I had a chance to see you acting like this, I really am. It's real weird, but it's refreshing." He shrugged, uneasily. I "The only thing is-you shouldn't have brought me out here. That just wasn't a good idea. I don't belong in any place like this. I'm not like these people. You should have left me alone." He lifted the pick carefully and placed on his narrow shoulder.