Afterparty by Daryl Gregory

Author:Daryl Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We lay in the dark, side by side, neither of us moving—yet I knew Ollie was awake. It must have been one of the first skills evolved by mammals, this hyperawareness to our cave-mates sprawled around us in the dark, an instinctive understanding of which movements were the random shufflings of sleep, and which were stirrings of restlessness, fear, or hunger. The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.

Dr. Gloria sat in an armchair near the window, legs crossed, notepad on her lap, writing. She did this all the time, filling page after phantom page. Who would read this invisible book?

Ollie and I were exhausted and should have been able to sleep—even here, in the heart of the Mohawk Nation, in the house that untaxed tobacco had built. The home of Roy Smoke. When he told us his name I thought he was fucking with us, but he assured us that Smokes had lived here for generations. He loaded us into a gleaming pickup that probably cost a fortune to keep in gasoline, then drove us three minutes down the road. Somewhere in the dark we crossed over from Quebec to New York. There was no port-of-entry on the Akwesasne Reserve, not even a border marker that I could see.

Roy’s house was a sprawling two-story McMansion with ten bedrooms and kids’ toys strewn across the carpet. “Oh those grandkids,” he told us, pushing a plastic trike out of the way.

Everyone was asleep, but his wife Linnie woke up to greet Roy, and didn’t blink when Roy said we’d be spending the night. She was a heavyset, apple-cheeked woman with stiff black hair and an easy way about her. She made a fuss over Ollie, who was still wet and shaking with cold, and gave her a fleece hoodie and sweatpants to wear. (Whatever was in Ollie’s backpack, it wasn’t clothes, and I didn’t dare ask her to open it in front of the smugglers.) The sweats were several sizes too big, but everything was too big for Ollie.

They sat us down in the kitchen and started hauling out chicken-fried steak, gravy, corn, mashed potatoes, and cornbread, plus a loaf of white Wonder bread and a bucket of real butter.

“They’re beigetarians,” Dr. Gloria said.

I wasn’t about to complain. Comfort food was exactly what we needed. Or what I needed. Ollie barely ate, and spoke even less. At first I chalked it up to the cold, but even after her chills had died down she seemed to be somewhere else, her gaze fixed on the middle of the table.

It didn’t seem to bother Roy or Linnie. Roy talked as I ate, explaining at length the justness of his tobacco business. I thought of Christian soup kitchens where the price of the meal was a sermon, and like other homeless people, I took the deal. Roy let me know that the tobacco trade was absolutely legal and, more than that, integral to their tribal independence. Canada, he said, had no right to place taxes on products that the tribe produced, on their own land.

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