The Dropouts

The county is as rural as rural gets. Its population is exceedingly small, 328 people according to the census-derived info on the internet. But there’s actually just under sixty more, hidden away where even the drones don’t fly.

Og was screaming. Several of his tribe were trying to remove a spear from his leg. This was tricky work. The only halfway appropriate tool the half-naked medics who were treating Og’s leg had was a rusty old saw. Just then, the busy saw teeth made it through the shaft of the weapon penetrating the old man’s leg.

“Got it, Og!” Daryl crowed.

Others rushed in to clean the wound and apply healing herbs.

“Any whisky left?” Og begged.

“No, they got our still last week, old man. Remember?”

Indeed, the two tribes were often stealing from each other. Raiding each other for women. And, of course, killing each other. Cops were never called. Nobody ever went to a hospital. Everything was off the grid and off the record.

It had started as a dare between two rival factions of survivalists who knew each other on the internet. It was a couple of extended families of survivalists from the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. It was going to be a long weekend survivalist challenge, a contest between two tribes. Many of them were fans of the grittier reality shows, like Survivor and Naked and Afraid. But those shows never went far enough, everyone agreed.

Things soon got out of hand. Someone died in an honest accident a few days before the thing was to end, but the other tribe didn’t see it that way. They thought one of their own had been murdered. This triggered a blood feud. Harsh insults were lobbed. Group pride was injured. Another gauntlet was thrown down. All the members of both tribes swore a pact to stay on. They sent their last text messages to family, giving their bogus excuses for their staying on, and then the phones were switched off and locked up again. They went back to their respective caves and huddled around their fires. Somebody was pregnant. It would be the first baby born in the new Stone Age.

It had been two months and change out of civilization by this time.

The spearing of Og was a really dirty thing. Og was the oldest member of the Red Ford Explorer Tribe. He wasn’t harming anyone. True, he had sticky fingers and was making night raids over there around their stores and animal pens. But they could have just thrown a rock. There were revenge grumbles going around the cave.

Nobody in the Red Ford Explorer Tribe knew that Og had killed a twenty-four-year-old man the previous night when he had tried to stop the old codger from stealing some coyote steaks. Og wasn’t offering that part up.

So over at the Pabst Blue Ribbon Tribe they were planning a massacre. One of the woman suggested they return to their (forbidden) vehicles and retrieve their (forbidden) modern world weaponry. This was roundly shouted down. There was to be honor among caveman. There might be a massacre, but it would be done with the correct tools.

While Og was being treated, Jeremiah was being buried in a very private grave alongside a creek where he loved to catch crayfish the tribe all enjoyed together in an improvised broth. His young widow (stolen from the other tribe) cursed her own parents in the enemy tribe as the young man’s body was placed in the hole which had been dug with a shovel secretly retrieved from the Vehicle Field (totally cheating).

Two men from the Pabst tribe were nearly a hundred miles away in a small town, watching a suburban street. It was early morning. They were watching students walking to high school. The man on the passenger side beckoned a boy with a blue backpack to come over to their S.U.V. He was holding a road map out the window, waving his bait. All the other kids were gone now. The blue backpack was the last walker on the street.

“Yeah, he’s got nice muscles. A nice solid build. Probably a wrestler. He’ll do,” the driver mumbled, while smiling at the boy the whole time through the windshield.

Once the tall young man reached the S.U.V., it was over in a minute. Bound on the floor in the back, tears soaked his face.

The guy on the passenger side rifled the kid’s phone, caught up briefly on the news in the outside world, then took the battery out and chucked the phone.

The kid was pleading by now through the duct tape across his mouth, but those weren’t words coming out. The shot he had been given was starting to take effect. It would soon be lights out.

“Don’t worry, kid. We ain’t a couple of perverts. We’re taking you to a great place. You have a destiny to fulfill. You’re gonna be a warrior. Old school warr-i-or! Much better than whatever shit you were going to do when you went to school today. Trust me.”

It was true that the tribe had a 100% success rate so far with abductees. They adjusted after a short period of rebellion. Usually only a few days, really.

Of course, if you wanted to leave, you had to go for a walk in the woods with Psychopath. He was the least nice member of the Pabst tribe. Psychopath would always come back from that walk alone, and the other members of the tribe would be told that the member who went with him was “restored to civilization.” Everyone knew what that meant. So people didn’t ask to leave. The Ford tribe also had an enforcer. Her name was Margaret.

So MISSING posters continued to go up on telephone poles and in storefronts in the small towns around the state. But never any too close to the caves. Always they drove far out to find the young men and women they needed.

The tribes had initially numbered only 51 people combined. A net increase of eight bodies had been realized by the time of the second casualty. There had been three whiners taken out between the two enforcers from the separate tribes. There had been some wife swapping and some agreed contractual hunting for additional warriors on both sides, both male and female. It kept the contest interesting.

“You want to stop at Mickey D’s?” the driver asked the rider. “Before heading back and drawing up them battle plans? That boy’s totally out cold.”

“Shit, that’s cheatin’ and you know it, Sam. But alright. Don’t tell a soul and get rid of all the trash, for sure. Fast food is capital punishment now, remember?”

“Don’t fucking burp or fart around any of the tribe, either. Get us both killed. But I’d like to hunt them son’a’bitches on something more solid than plant roots. And that coyote gone bad tasted like shit. I think I got Lyme Disease or some shit like that.”

“Tell me about it. We’re going to have to go on more of these people runs, ya know. After we take out as many as Sondra is planning. I don’t want to wipe ’em out completely though. Would ruin the fun, know what I mean?”

“No, I totally agree. We can seed the other tribe with newbies after it all goes down. Man, I really don’t miss my job back home. Not one fuckin’ bit!”

He laughed.

The other man laughed too.

“Me neither, man. Me fuckin’ neither.”

“We have a special on the new egg sandwich today,” the nerdy female voice coming out of the menu board offered.

“Give me ten,” said the driver. “And two milkshakes as cold as you can make ’em, sweetheart.”

Sleeping Cat

The cat sprawls on a window’s blue sill. His eyes are closed. He absorbs a distant star’s fury as something intended only for him. The sun’s fury has been refined to something soothing. Merely by distance. The window’s glass holds a reflected world, but no one is watching. Brahms plays softly somewhere in the house. Another room. Distant, subdued talking. An Intermezzo.

A child rummages quietly through a small sheaf of papers. Schoolwork’s all over her bed. The girl no longer even hears Brahms, though the recording is audible anywhere in the house. It’s been played so often these past few months, that it’s like (not) hearing one’s own breathing. One intermezzo whispers into another. The girl studies a simple division problem and her answer. She feels a strange twinge when she realizes that her answer to the math problem is the same as the answer given by every child or adult on the planet. If those people give the correct answer.

For a brief moment, she feels jealous of the children who will get the math problem wrong. For a handful of heartbeats, she feels this. At least their answer will be theirs. She doesn’t follow this thought to all the places, she senses, that it wants to travel. Maybe this is because she is eight and being wrong is still fearful. She stares at the cat in her bedroom window in his full glory of sun. She enticingly whispers his name, Mooshi, just to make him lose a bit of his heaven for a moment and look back at her. His eyes open. Seeing that she wants nothing, the cat’s eyes close again.

Distant, subdued talking. Her parents go back and forth. It’s a fraught conversation. Is it too soon? Is it right? They talk about their daughter, Elise. Their only child. Brahms goes from intermezzo to intermezzo. Alicia mentions the cat. Maybe start with the cat. Explain it to her that way. Matthew is not sure. He shakes his head as he looks out the bay window into full sun. He closes his eyes against all that brightness.

The neighbor across the street, Sue, widens a slat in her window blinds and peeks out. She sees Matthew standing in the window’s full sun, blinded. She remembers the horror all those years ago. She figures she must be the only neighbor left on that street that remembers the story. Matthew and Alicia were young then. They had everything back then.

She remembers one particular day. Sue had been walking the dog she called her little “street duster,” her Shih Tzu, and they had gone past a joyous leaf fight which had erupted as Matthew was raking leaves in the front yard with his wife and daughter. His first daughter. The one who is gone. How long has it been? Seventeen years? Eighteen? Now the couple is middle aged. There is a palimpsestic sadness showing through their new layer of happiness. Even the little girl is more sober than the first one, who was so lighthearted. Strange little girls of today, she thinks.

She remembers how she would sometimes watch the other little girl walking to school under leaves turning red and yellow in autumn. Or see her skipping home on a spring day, maybe stopping on the sidewalk to find a robin’s egg that had fallen from its nest. The miracle of the unbroken. Adorable child, she thinks. There are monsters everywhere. What those parents must have gone through, she thinks and shakes her head. She refuses to imagine, she just can’t, what the girl herself faced. It’s impossible.

Now they drive her to school. She’s never seen the child walking anywhere alone.

She remembers how she would see the child’s cat still sitting in her bedroom window. That went on years after she disappeared. That cat must have lived another seven years. At least. And then one day she saw Alicia and Matthew burying something in their backyard. Something wrapped in a blue blanket. And that was the last of the child’s great love. It had been raining that dark afternoon. It had made it even more awful to see. They had never been able to bury their child.

Matthew and Alicia decide to wait. There would be days and days of growing ahead. Let’s wait until it won’t be everything, Matthew begged. Alicia thanked him for sparing them both. But should we explain about the cat? We could show her a photograph of just the cat. A photograph of the cat, all by itself? No, said Matthew. Let the cat stay the cat. So they made dinner and joked with their daughter in that goofy way she loved and smiled upon her as they dined together. Brahms went to sleep. Later, they watched some shows with her and the child made popcorn for all three of them. They shared the warm popcorn and feelings. And then they went to bed.

*

In the night, the girl is awakened by a skittering sound.

She bolts to a sitting position in her bed. In fear, she reaches out to touch her cat for comfort. The cat is already alert, staring at the window. A finger is tapping there. A woman’s manicured finger. There is a strange woman smiling into the room from the moonlight. She is tap-tap-tapping at the child’s window like that Raven in the poem by the strange looking man with the huge forehead that she only recently learned in school.

The child wonders briefly if she should scream, but the moment for that has passed. If she has not screamed by now, a scream would be an artificial thing. A scream must just happen to be a scream. Not that the child doesn’t feel terror.

She slides out of the bed in her pajamas and walks, carefully, towards the window.

The woman is smiling at her. Why does her face look so familiar?

Through the window glass she hears smudged words: “I want to come in.”

The child couldn’t open the window even if she wanted to. It’s locked. It’s too difficult to lift. And she know there is an alarm system to protect her.

The woman smiles and smiles in the moonlight. She’s not truly all that old. Certainly not as old as her parents. Her smile is full and her lips are bright red, but her smile looks painful.

“This used to be my room,” the woman laughs. “I slept in that same bed.”

The little girl’s eyes grow large. This woman is crazy.

Elise runs to her parents now, barefoot. The shrill tocsin, the screamed alarm of their names, wakes them and they come running. Her mother catches her running body. Her father checks her bedroom.

The child tells them a story that turns them to stone.

*
Elise is at school.

“It had to be a sick prank,” Matthew nearly whispers.

Alicia doesn’t respond. She is staring at a photo of her firstborn, a young girl holding a cat.

That cat walks into the kitchen from the living room just then. Not exactly that cat. But almost that cat.

“They never found her, Matthew. They found the blood. They found all the other girls. But they never found her.”

“You’re trying to tell me you actually believe it’s her. Do you realize how crazy that sounds?”

Alicia continues to stare at the image in her palm in silence for a while longer.

“Elise’s description of the woman matched, Matthew.”

“Look, we waited years. I refuse to believe…there’s just no realistic possibility…okay, even if, one in a million, it actually was her, then why the hell would she be tapping on a window instead of ringing the front door bell and walking right in? Try to explain that part to me, okay?”

Alicia didn’t reply right away. She didn’t look up from the photograph. She felt sick in her stomach, and you could hear that stomach sickness in her voice when she finally found the strength to speak.

“Maybe because she saw herself sleeping in her own bed, Matthew. Maybe because she saw herself sleeping with her cat. Maybe because she saw she had been copied, like a traced drawing or a xeroxed document, and knew that we were sleeping in the next room. Peacefully. Maybe because we gave up. We started over. Maybe because we saw her as….replaceable…”

Her words became sobs. She struggled to speak; her legs felt weak; she felt dizzy.

“Matthew, she wanted to take our little girl. She wanted to…I can’t even bear to think of what she wanted to…what she intended to…”

She choked on her own sobbing. Her husband held her. They were no longer young.

The photograph of the girl with the cat was on a counter now. All by itself.

Nothing staring at nothing. The way photographs really are.

“It’s time to pick Elise up at school. Let’s go together.”

Alicia nodded. They went out from the kitchen into the garage and got into the sedan.

As the garage door opened automatically, they stared at the rain together in silence.

*

Not that many miles away, a young woman stood in the same cold rain. She was in a city park, staring down at the dark river below a steep bank. She thought of it heading down to the bay and wondered how many lifetimes people had stared at it and known absolutely nothing.

A homeless man approached and asked her if she wanted his coat. He was older, a relic of some native tribe or other, and seemed kind.

She shook her head no.

“No man, I’m just waiting for my sister.”

“Your sister? Is she as pretty as you?”

“Oh, she’s just as pretty as me. Actually, she’s even prettier.”

“What are you two lovely ladies going to do?”

“We’re going to go on a long trip together. A spirit journey. Get to know each other and know the world. The way things are. You know what that means, right?”

She smiled down at the dark river. As if she knew it.

He looked at the dark river and tried to see what she saw.

She disturbed him. Something about the glitter of her eyes. He remembered walking down a dark road once with a shaman who was not really a shaman, but something else.

“Yeah, ” he said, and walked away.