7
Aside from the unfortunate souls who came and went daily at Quig’s compound there were forty or so people who were settled there, children included. Most all of them, like Loreen, had first come as patients or else had accompanied patients who died and then, if they could perform some function or service the place required, were allowed to stay on. The still luckier ones — chosen by Quig and Quig alone — could reside in one of the rooms of the winged main house, while the rest lived a few steps down the hill in the complex of shanties that hugged the slope. Over the years these cramped, head-high huts had been erected and added on to exterior wall by exterior wall, and were connected via internal cutouts to form a continuous warren of rooms. You could start from the top and work your way downward through various people’s lairs and end up at the bottom and peer back to see the boxy assemblage of corrugated plastic and plywood and asphalt shingle and tarp, a miniature, junked version of some ancient hillside town in Europe or South America one can search in the archives.
You can imagine this is the sight Fan beheld after Sewey guided her through the huts the first time. It was a couple of weeks since leaving B-Mor and her leg was almost right, the injury in fact probably just a deep bone bruise and no doubt healing faster because of Fan’s superior physical fitness. We sometimes forget that even compared with the most experienced tank divers in the prime of their careers she had a chance to be the finest diver B-Mor had ever known. Kilo for kilo she was stronger than anyone, squat-lifting a record factor of her mass, and as noted, she could hold her breath to that point when it seems certain every cell in your body is going to burst and then in a miracle push past it to the other side, to what must be an altered state of seamless quiet, as if you just broke past the speed of sound. It is a matter of singular will. The very will, we know, that Fan drew upon in the storeroom as she worked her legs in deep bends and stretches at night, often while Sewey jawed on, or when she forced herself to down an extra soy drink or braid of chicken jerky to build up her strength. Or most of all, not flinching and trembling whenever Quig unexpectedly appeared to examine her, his cool, rough fingertips testing her exposed thigh, knowing she was likely safest if he and everyone else in the compound considered her to be still a child, a situation that could not endure long.
It appears her plan was to wait until she was certain her leg was strong enough to set off again on her own. This seems amazing, given what we know, for we have to ask ourselves once more: what was she thinking, when she set out from B-Mor in the first place, and in so headlong a fashion? It is either outrageous fortune or destiny that Quig’s car struck and injured her that first night and thus brought her to a place with shelter and food and that served as a crossroads of sorts in that part of the counties, where people naturally shared word of other settlements, villages, facilities. And although we can debate forever whether cruel fate or good fortune is Fan’s predicating sign, it must be noted that when she left us there was no hope or consciousness of either in her mind, nothing but a furious purpose and the capacity to disregard the usual rational considerations of her own well-being and the chances of reuniting with Reg, which were meager at best. Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he’s going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can’t stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too soon delivers him to a precarious ledge, where he can no longer turn back. And while it’s easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn’t this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?
When Fan was able, Sewey took her around the main house and huts, as well as the land around the compound. It was mid-September, still the heart of summer, the foliage of white oak and black cherry and hemlock and countless other species of trees distressed and washed out by the fierceness of the light. The trees were bristling in the dry wind but they were full, crowding all around them, covering the tops of the hills right down the steeply pitched slopes to the banks of the slow-running rivers and streams. From the moment she hiked down the hillside from the huts the first time she was startled by the denseness of the trees, for the school units and evening programs at B-Mor would have you think that the landscape of the open counties was mostly stripped of vegetation and thus devoid of any wildlife save for insects and ground-dwelling rodents, a stretch of dusty nothingness and grubby, wayside slums stitched by the network of major roadways that ran between large grow facilities and the Charter villages. Fan was accustomed to the trees in the parks of B-Mor, every last one of them strategically placed along paved walkways and the hawker-thoroughfares to provide shade, or set in a bower for the sake of privacy, or dotting the banks of an engineered pond where pedi-boaters could wade to shore and secure their crafts to the trunks. Along the straight, lengthy avenues they were planted one for every two row houses, selected for ease of care, the kind that did not throw off too many nuts or pods or sprays of pollen. These were maintained in equal measure by the bordering households and pruned to a specified height and girth.
Of course, there were plenty of sawed-down trunks dotting the hillside of Quig’s compound. The cutting had been done spottily, however, so that the main house and huts were still continuously surrounded by woods, the perimeter of which was patrolled by a platoon of men known as the Boys. They were not boys at all, though a few of them were in their late teens, most being men who had experience or training in security or the military. Like everyone else, each man or a beloved had been treated (probably in a dire moment) by Quig, and by virtue of this and the bonds to their kin and friends who were similarly indebted, they were deeply loyal to him and the general welfare of the compound.
Sewey aspired to join their ranks and complained to Fan about having to do the boring job of passing out tickets rather than scouting the area and warding off bandits and hunting for squirrels and woodchucks while doing so, which he said was as good as he’d ever want, which is what he’d do for the rest of his life. And whenever they caught sight of a couple of the Boys with their rifles slung over their shoulders, he waved wildly at them, and if they waved not-so-wildly back, Sewey would bemoan his plight all over again, and Fan couldn’t help but think how little where you were or the prospects of your circumstances mattered sometimes, for even out here in a place like this a boy’s modest hopes could hold him in thrall.
Fan did her part at first by helping Sewey manage the waiting line of the sick and miserable. She watched how he gave out the numbered tickets and then took them back once they went in to be examined by Quig. Things got confusing with the bidding that often arose, people jumping places in the line and then jumping again, and Fan made it simpler by doing away with the tickets altogether and instituting a separate bidders’ line alongside those taking places as they arrived. Soon enough there was a third line, for people with nothing, or at least nothing to give save themselves. Fan simply intended to help Sewey and wondered if she had done the right thing, for though it soon became clear that the new system was working, with fewer arguments and fights breaking out, the most surprising result was that people were offering more than before, perhaps because they could readily look across at the other lines and see the things others had come bearing. Loreen couldn’t help but be pleased. Quig, whom they rarely saw, didn’t seem to notice, or care if he did.