Inhabited. Charlie Quimby
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their little under-the-table empire was better off including only family. It was too early to head for Freedom City so he sat and read for a while. Mike, the hero of the book, had made a dangerous plan to evade pursuing lawmen by jumping bareback and naked into a wild river cauldron that would suck them underground and maybe spit them out again. Either way, dead or alive, Mike would become free. Isaac knew something sad was about to happen to Potatoes the horse but he kept reading. The horse began to swim against the current until Mike turned his head downriver. The horse knew. Or maybe he didn’t, but he was faithful to Mike. The adventure had distracted Isaac but now sorrow overwhelmed him. He wanted the trackers on the ridge to see Mike and capture him before it was too late but they were only visible to each other for one second and what if the trackers looked away just then? Isaac could feel the pages thin in his right hand but he had to stop reading. Mike was selfish. He thought he and Potatoes were one, that the horse cared about his philosophy. The trackers only saw the river and the river didn’t care if they drowned or surfaced again. Isaac cried for the horse and wept for himself and how life was only one second on the river.
Car doors slammed. Isaac couldn’t see them but he knew from the scrabbling in the street the kids with the remote car were back. He couldn’t read now with his brain listening for the whine to start up.
He didn’t want trouble so he tried to wait them out before departing to work. As the shop’s closing time approached, he made his usual preparations to leave camp. A sliver of grass across his duffel’s zipper; a pebble on the cooler lid; the camp stove leaned against a tree at a forty-five-degree angle. Then he marked the relative positions of everything with twigs. At least he’d know if anything had been disturbed. Now it was getting late. He’d have to go. He dropped his bike into low gear and waited for a break in the noise. When it came, he burst out of the trees hunched over and pedaling hard. One boy fingered the controller while the other two crouched over a black car with batwing fenders. Just as Isaac hit the pavement, he heard that revving dentist drill sound as the car reared on two wheels.
“Watch out hobo!” one of them yelled.
“Did you say hobo or homo?” another laughed.
The thing screamed past Isaac’s tires and cut abruptly in front of him, but turning too fast, it rolled with a hard plastic clatter and flipped into the gravel at the road’s edge. Isaac cranked away without looking back. If the car was broken, it would be his fault.
Isaac raced the back way to Freedom City, jumping the curbs and landscape barriers that separated the parking lots. The inflatables stood like sentinels protecting the store against invasion. Barry had already taken in the hot dog stand. Mai must have melted in front of those windows reflecting heat like a solar cooker. Another grievance she could hold against Barry, who’d insisted the free food would be a big draw, as if people couldn’t wait to get a jump on eating their fill of Fourth of July hot dogs. The giant flag, which never came down because it required six to fold it, snapped overhead, the only sound in the empty parking lot. Inside, the display lights were off; only security lamps illuminated the shelves. Shit. He wasn’t that late. The door resisted his pull. They’d probably locked up against stragglers while they finished in back.
He cut the power to the bald eagle and the air dancer. The eagle began to sag and Elastic Man immediately collapsed. Isaac ripped loose the Velcro skirt attaching the nylon sleeve to the blower and removed Elastic Man’s telescoping support pole. By the time he’d finished breaking down the dancer, the eagle lay on its side. Isaac walked the air pockets flat so he could fold the bird. The dolly for moving the displays was still inside. He pounded the heavy glass with both fists. No response. He went around to the receiving door and tried the buzzer. Nothing. Barry’s red Silverado wasn’t in its usual parking place. The possibility of murder-suicide simmered in the store some days, the only question being which spouse would be which. But dead men didn’t drive and neither did Mai. More likely, they were unwilling to witness further the travesty of America’s Big Blowout Birthday Event. What did they expect him to do with the doors locked—abandon his responsibility? Where was the respect? People always looked through him, walked past him, talked over his head as if he were ignorant. They assumed the worst. Barry, at least, should know better. He depended on Isaac morning and night, took him along to customers’ houses. He trusted him on the farm property and put his approval in writing. Isaac had fulfilled their deal to the letter and the day! And now Barry had blown him off without even a note. No Sorry, Isaac. Had an emergency. Back soon. No Key’s under the sandbag—have a Happy Fourth! He heard Mai saying to Barry—Nobody going to buy. Just leave in parking lot. Melt. Kids take. Who care?
Nobody cares. They didn’t need him. His agreement with Barry would unravel the second he moved his camp. Mai wanted his job for one of her nephews. She would attack and Barry would fold. Like the innocent horse in the river, Isaac was about to be drowned by his master’s folly. The six-foot-tall birthday cake mocked him. Happy, the second layer said. Isaac was not happy but then it was not his birthday. He unsheathed Jake’s knife and tried to slash off the top of the candles. They simply flattened and bounced back up. He braced the cake with his foot and free hand and thrust into its Happy middle, releasing a fart of vulcanized air. He slit the elephant’s trunk. It slumped to its knees and blubbered until Isaac unplugged the blower. Stabbing Uncle Sam seemed semi-treasonous, so he attacked the rocket he rode. With a sigh, they expired as one.
Isaac awakened to the sit-sit-sit of lawn sprinklers. Probing for an uncompressed inch of cardboard between his elbow and the river cobble, he remembered where he was, near the entrance to an office park under a low umbrella of yews that provided its only park-like touch. He was totally fucked now. Barry had only gone for takeout and left Mai locked in the store so she wouldn’t have to deal with Isaac. From behind the dumpster, he’d heard them fight over the carnage outside. They started by blaming each other, but eventually they would figure out it was him. For the first time in months he could sleep in. Nobody in the office park was coming to work on Independence Day.
Isaac didn’t require Wesley’s bike trailer to move his camp after all. His Coleman stove and cooler were missing, along with the tarp; clothes from his duffel scattered in bushes and hung from branches; the slashed tent, crumpled on bent poles, was spray-painted NØHØBØZ; tent stakes were stabbed through the yoga mat. He found his sleeping bag sopping in the ditch. He apologized for dragging Wesley out here.
“Come back to the island with us,” Wesley said. “We don’t let this shit happen down there.”
What Wesley meant was that he didn’t let it happen. Wesley stood a shade above six feet, one-quarter of which seemed to be his close-cropped head, a skull as wide as a cinderblock with a jaw that seemed to predate civilization. His face had fleshed out and his arms lacked their old definition but his bulk still promised the capacity to do serious damage. It was well known on the river that in the military Wesley had acquired serious survival skills that went far beyond what berries to eat in the wilderness. Isaac regarded him as a peacekeeper, someone like the president who you’d trust to murder on your behalf.
But having Wesley on the island didn’t guarantee peace on the river. The banks curdled with defeated tribes declaring war on each other—hard partiers, domestic disturbers, raving anchorites, angst bearers, mental-case poets. Loud was how they fought, expressed ecstasy and pain, showed strength, attracted witnesses, alerted allies, cleared space. Volume was an unarmed man’s weapon, a lone woman’s bodyguard, a weakling’s last hope.
Isaac figured he might last there a week.
The group waiting for the Day Center to open looked the same to Isaac as every weekday. Men and women cupping cigarettes and clutching sacks of laundry. People locking their bikes and chaining their dogs. The bleary-eyed and red-faced ready for a breakfast of sugar and powdered creamer laced with weak coffee. Women seeking a safe place to sit out the morning. The jobless who needed a routine as badly as a paycheck.
Inside or out, waiting was the main activity at the Day Center. Waiting for a washing machine or a shower. Waiting for the phone or to sign in for a storage bin. Waiting for the mail to arrive or for somebody to finish with the newspaper. Waiting for the crapper—that was the worst. And when the Day Center closed at noon you went