Mukoli

Trailer 9

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What Moved the Judges

“A tribute to the silent workers, the keepers of peace, and facilitators of freedom. When the stakes are high, there is little room for sentimentality and show.”

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Abraham Thomas calls his watch the graveyard shift, when he feels like joking. When the cadavers don’t circle around him and press in on his thoughts. 

Sometimes he wishes he flipped burgers like his colleagues. Fries. He imagines shaking the grease from the hot fries, dumping them, salting, stirring. Or computers. If he had known enough about computers for those jobs vacated by the Under Thirties.  He never expected to have to pick a job that wasn’t teaching. 

The moon is full, making the fresh barbed wire glint in loose circles at the top of the fence. The crematorium is silent. He is grateful for the night shift. The day shift rolls the dead children on their gurneys from the trailers, loads them into the fires, gathers and labels the ashes, loads the next victims. Sterilizes the gurneys. Places new arrivals on sterilized gurneys. 

All Abe does is wait and guard his charges through the long night.  Whether his mission is to keep them in or others out, he does not know. His charges lie dead of Pox. After the weekly Inspection, the day shift will take them out. 

He thinks he hears the sound of movement, but sometimes his imagination hears things by itself. Then a meow gives him back his sanity. It is a cat.

He climbs the makeshift stairs to Trailer 9, his trailer, the one they hauled over from the overcrowded high school when it closed. He opens the flimsy door. The cold draft hits his face and then the smell. He’s used to it now, and he finds his desk in the dark and switches on the small desk lamp that Pamela gave him. The chalk board at the end of the trailer’s single room still announces an assignment long since overdue. 

Tonight, Abe’s charges in Trailer 9 include three former students, two boys from the grammar class and a girl from advanced lit. Jeffery, Dan, and Sherry. One by one he pulls the sheet off each face and tucks it in around the shoulders. There is a fourth boy Abe thinks he recognizes, a point guard from the school’s arch rival, but it’s hard to tell with the pus and scars and all. There are six he doesn’t recognize, laid in a row with the others like a crop of beans on level ground. All teens. They’ve been here almost a week. Tomorrow, he starts a new class. 

Jeffey is argumentative tonight, Abe thinks. Abe lectures on correct verb tenses but he isn’t getting through. He tries a joke. No one laughs. Maybe tomorrow he will teach history. History is full of jokes, he thinks. Or chemistry. He always wanted to teach science and to preside over those magnificent labs. 

Sherry, he worries about. He knows she’s self-conscious about the zits. She never smiles. Dan should have been more careful. His thick glasses were removed before they brought him, and his face seems emptier than the empty faces of the others. Abe has thought about bringing him a pair of glasses, so he can see, but Abe doesn’t make much money as a night guard. Even with no family to support, it is barely enough to keep himself going. 

He tells another joke and laughs at himself. Then another. His laughter echoes off thin metal walls covered only with a thin sheet of fake paneling. At least the room is carpeted, albeit with the hard dense-weave industrial carpeting they put in schools. 

The Pox Administration has exhausted its supply of body bags, and now they use and reuse sheets that they sterilize. He pulls the sheets off the other children’s faces for the evening, to let them have air. The day shift complains, so he will cover them back when he leaves in the morning, but it bothers him to do so. 

He dismisses his class and leaves the trailer to make rounds again. Each hour he leaves his trailer and strolls through the compound. He opens each of the twenty trailer doors, he peers in with a flashlight, he closes the door and goes to the next. The bodies all lie north and south, and the trailers lie east and west in two rows of ten each. He imagines an aerial view of the symmetry. It is orderly. When all else fails, he clings to order. 

Back in Trailer 9 he switches on the overhead light and heads for the bathroom at the back of the trailer, past the children, his children. He drinks a lot of coffee to keep himself awake. 

Though he tries to sleep in the daytime, he still gets sleepy at night. 

The sound of flushing continues long after he returns to his desk and turns off the overhead light. The desk light is sufficient for the book he reads, for it is now his planning period. The toilet is always slow to fill, and the sound of the water flowing back into the bowl is comforting, like a mountain brook over rocks. Then the hiss of air-conditioning starts up, keeping the bodies cold, and adding to the gentle noises of the toilet’s flow. He wraps his thick jacket tighter around his chest.  

Another sound nudges at his ears. A tender, quiet, breathing sound that is not his own. He imagines a heartbeat to go with it. Sherry? Dan? He has often wished they would awake and speak. Jeffery? The point guard? 

The sound of slow padded footsteps joins the medley, as though a crouching person is inching his way across the carpeting. In the dim light, a sheet stirs. It is the barest of motions, but Abe is instantly on his feet, alert. 

“Who’s there!” It is more order than question. 

The footsteps stop. The breathing stops. The heartbeat he has imagined, also stops. It was Dan’s sheet that moved, Abe thinks, maybe searching for his glasses. 

“Who’s there?” he calls again in a softer tone. He hesitates. In the six months he has held the job, he has never encountered an intruder, a visitor. He has no weapon. No plan. His own heart is beating faster and faster. 

“I say, who’s there. Is anyone there?” 

He hears fast footsteps toward the door, and a dark figure is rushing down the aisle at the foot of the gurneys. 

“Stop,” he shouts. “I say there, stop.” 

The dark figure freezes, and he sees it is a girl, a teenage girl. She bolts for the door but he reaches it first and grabs her wrist. 

“Stop,” he repeats. He turns her toward him. “Emily?”  

She relaxes a little. “Mr. Thomas!” 

“Emily, what are you doing here? You’ll catch the Pox!”  He stares at her face, wishing fervently that she had not come. 

“I had to see Dan.”  She says this as if it is the most normal plan in the world. 

“I’ve got to get you out of here, before . . . 

“No, please. I . . . let me stay.  Please?”  Emily clasps her hands beneath her chin, almost like a prayer. 

Abe sighs. “You can’t. You’ll be exposed. Oh, Emily, what were you thinking?”  Abe shakes his head sadly and sighs again. 

“I love him. I couldn’t bear not to see him” 

“But he’s dead,” says Abe. “He’s already dead.” 

“They wouldn’t let me go to the funeral, you know.”  

“I know,” he says. “They can’t let you catch it.”   

Abe can’t tell if she is angry or sad or both, but he knows teens and he knows the ambivalence that haunts their changing brains. 

“We never get to say goodbye.” 

“No, I guess you don’t,” Abe admits. 

In the dim light from the desk, Abe can see angry lines on Emily’s young face. “It’s just not fair!” she says. 

“What’s not fair?” he asks, although, of course, he knows. 

“That all you old people got the shot when you were kids.”  

Abe knows she is talking about the small pox shot that left a scar on his arm, marking him and the lucky ones born before 1971. Twenty-nine years ago. People over thirty. 

“They’ll have new shots ready in six months. It’s not that long,” says Abe. “And the virus isn’t mutating. They check every week and it’s always the same. A very stable virus.” 

Suddenly, a thought intrudes and Abe looks away. Emily notices and she mentions the thing that has come to his mind. 

“I’m sorry about Ms. Thomas,” she says. Pamela Thomas had been twenty-eight the year the Pox struck. Abe hasn’t seen Emily since losing Pamela. 

“Here, come outside with me,” says Abe. 

“I want to stay here with him.” 

“You can’t. You know that.” 

“I can’t catch it. I’m immune,” Emily says. 

“No, you’re not. The odds of natural immunity are one in ten. Teenagers think they’re immune. Then they show up here. Dead.” 

“Really, Mr. Thomas. You’ve got to believe me.” 

“Then tell me. Outside.” He is firm on this. Violation of the Family Quarantine Act carries the death penalty. “You could get me in a lot of trouble,” he adds. 

She walks down the shaky steps made of pressure-treated two-by-tens and sits on the bottom step. He sits beside her and waits for her to speak. He has to find a way to get her back to her house without being caught. 

“I’m going crazy,” she begins. “I’m cooped up in the house all day, every day. All night, every night. Net Ed is stupid, all the teachers are jerks.” 

Abe sees her face in the moonlight, her clear, beautiful skin. He aches to think of it pimpling up with the Pox, the pus accumulating, the scars. He doesn’t want to see her flat on a gurney. Or worse, he doesn’t want to imagine her scarred, blind body if she survives to stumble through the rest of her life. 

“I was exposed early. Months ago. I never got it.” She says this confidently. 

“A lot of kids think that. But they weren’t really exposed. They don’t really know, then it’s too late.” 

“But I know. I do know.” She is very sure of this. 

“How do you know?” Abe is talking to her but his mind is worrying about getting her back to her house, making sure they aren’t seen.  He scans the yard, and is relieved not to see anyone. 

“Do you remember Will?” she is asking. 

He nods. “The first at our school.” 

“We thought he had the worst case of zits ever,” she said. “But I already loved him. I already had . . .” What she was going to say, Abe guesses, is that she had already had sex with him, but she doesn’t say it. 

“. . .kissed him,” she says after the pause.  

“Even with the fever?” 

“I kept going back, and kissing him, and telling him. . .” 

“And you never got caught.” 

“Never.” 

Abe looks around. In the dark, he imagines he hears someone coming and he worries about what to say. “You’ve got to get home. Let me call your folks,” says Abe. 

“You can’t call them!” She seems frustrated at the suggestion. “This whole thing is unfair. I shouldn’t be in the same boat with the kids who aren’t immune.” 

This time Abe does hear a noise. Someone is coming from the other side of the trailer. The footsteps are muffled and soft, but unmistakable. Emily does not seem alarmed. 

“Hide in here,” he says. He opens the door and shoves her back up into the trailer. He follows her inside.  His hands are shaking. He hopes she will think to hide beneath a sheeted gurney. He holds his breath and hopes he doesn’t get caught. 

“Emily?” The voice is male, a young male. 

“What do you want?” Abe leans out the door to say. 

The young man freezes in the moonlight, too startled to speak. It is Brian. Brian Collins. 

Abe’s best student last year. 

“Brian, are you guys crazy?” 

“Emily. Is she here?” Brian gets the words out, but his eyes are shifting as if he’s thinking about running. 

Abe points toward the back of the trailer. 

“She’s in there. But you can’t . . . 

“I’m immune. It’ll be fine.” 

“You can’t assume you’re immune.” Brian slips in the door past Abe, who offers no resistance. 

“Emily. We’ve got to go. It’s time.” 

Emily has brought Dan’s glasses, and she slips them on his face. She’s straightening them, standing back to make sure they’re right. She adjusts one side, then the other.  “I can’t seem to get it even,” she says with a sigh. 

“Here, let me help,” says Abe. He works with the glasses, pushing them down into a pus encrusted scab that oozes yellow fluid. “There.” 

Dan’s empty face now bears his glasses, but with his eyes closed, it’s not as much improvement as Abe has thought it would be. Emily, too, seems disappointed. She leans over and plants a kiss on swollen lips. 

Brian stands at a distance, breathing shallow, tiny gulps of air. He seems about to gag. 

“I want to get out of here,” says Brian. “We can go early.”  

“Where?” asks Abe. He knows, but he wants them to say it. 

“We can’t say,” says Emily. Brian nods. 

“Yes, you can. I want you to say it.” 

“I can’t.” She looks at her feet and scratches the floor with the toe of her shoe. 

“It’s a full moon,” says Abe. In the beginning, the deaths had been spread evenly over the age groups. But when the younger kids were quarantined by parents and the law, and when the twenty-somethings left jobs for self-quarantining and the guaranteed Pox-welfare payments, teenagers dominated the death statistics. The death count ebbed and flowed on a monthly cycle, as though the virus was fortified by moonlight, the moon speaking to the virus to come forth and multiply. 

Carolyn had told him the truth. Carolyn, Pamela’s younger sister, had been one of the first to be initiated. 

“We can’t tell you. We’ve promised.” 

Brian slaps his hand over Emily’s mouth to stop her from saying more. “There’s nothing to tell,” says Brian, but Abe can see he knows it’s too late. 

Emily wiggles free and faces Brian. “He already knows,” says Emily who has figured this out faster than Brian. 

“I already know,” Abe confirms. The initiation procedure saddens him. If only they would wait. 

“I was initiated two months ago. Tonight is my confirmation,” says Brian. Abe sees the worried look in Brian’s eyes, as if he doesn’t quite believe it himself. 

“Two months. That means I’m free,” says Brian. “Free.” 

“Freedom at what price?” Abe muses. 

Emily and Brian exchange glances. Emily’s eyes become watery and Abe wonders if she will cry, but she doesn’t. 

“And Dan? What about Dan’s freedom?” Abe asks gently. “Or Jeffery’s? Or Sherry’s?” Emily blinks fast and turns away from them both. Abe can hear her breath catching.  

“You can’t keep doing this. It’s killing too many kids.” Abe wishes they would listen. 

“But we can’t wait.” 

“It’s only six months until the vaccine is ready.”  Abe says this but even he is unsure. 

“That’s what they say, but we know it will be longer. It could be years.” 

“Then wait the years. The day will come,” says Abe. He hopes they don’t see the ambivalence in his face. He feels their pain, their frustration. But he has a duty. 

“Give me the Internet site you use to organize. Let me turn it in,” says Abe. “I can help you stop this.” 

“No!” Brian shouts.  Abe does not know if he’s shouting at him or at Emily. 

“No one would trace it to you. You can trust me.” Abe has said this before and he knows it is a weak argument. 

“Emily, no!” says Brian. 

“And the password,” says Abe. 

“It’s the right thing to do. It’s the law.”  

“We don’t care, do we Emily?” says Brian. 

Emily doesn’t answer. 

“Do we?” he repeats. 

“Yes, we do care. He’s right. We can stop this.”  

Emily walks back to Dan’s body. She looks at the others, horizontal and still, their heads exposed at the top of sheeted bodies. 

“Emily, we shouldn’t. We can’t.”  Emily almost gives in but Abe can see it is hard for her. He makes it easier. 

“Tell me or I’m calling your parents,” Abe finally says. He wants their respect, their trust. 

But he knows his duty as adult. It is a tough a choice for him. For them. 

“You wouldn’t,” says Emily. “We trusted you.” 

“I know. But yes, I would,” says Abe. He tries to look firm. It is almost time to make rounds again and he needs this done. 

“OK,” she says finally. She writes a string of letters and numbers on a sheet of paper she grabs from Abe’s desk. “Here.” 

Abe scans the address and nods. “Is this the only address you use?” 

“Oh. Well, yeah,” says Emily, but Abe knows better, and he thinks Emily knows he knows. 

“If you think of another website, another address, let me know,” says Abe. He folds the paper and tucks it into his jacket pocket. 

“I’ll let you know,” says Emily. She looks at Brian and smiles a half smile. 

“Thanks,” says Abe. “You’ll be glad you did this.” 

He watches as Emily and Brian leave the trailer and scamper through the shadows. 

He dials the hotline number and relays the website address. 

“Sorry, sir. That’s a known false address. But thank you for calling. This is the one they give out to see if they can trust you.” 

Abe hangs up. He knows this message by heart. It is the one he always gets. When the world returns to normal, he’ll still be an authority figure, as teachers should be. But he’ll always know he let them get away. To freedom at any cost. 

He makes his rounds and returns to Trailer 9. A humorous poem, he decides, is what they need. Something for a little laugh. 

And one day, he hopes, they will listen to him. 

* * * 

Biff Briscoe and Buddy Jones work the day shift.  They have orders to carry the bodies to the crematorium since the inspectors finished the day before. 

It is midday before they reach Trailer 9, and it is then they first notice Dan’s empty gurney. 

Biff shrugs and looks at Buddy.  It happens sometimes. 

“Too much damn paperwork,” Buddy says, and they both know what he means. 

They load the fires and then gather the ashes for urns they labeled the day before.  Families don’t know how much ash to expect, and they pour a little of Sherry and Jeffery into Dan’s urn.   

It’s simpler that way. 

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