Page 14 of Road Refugees

Orchid’s upper lip recoiled. “Eyew. So, like, just for fun?”

“His fun.”

“Well, let’s get you cleaned up. Take a shower, everything. I have a room upstairs.”

We took two fresh beers with us.

Orchid yammered, “This is a pretty cool club, if you don’t take into account Byron and a couple of others who don’t respect women. I carry pepper spray in my bra in case one of those jagovs gets too handsy with me. Looks like you’re about my size. I can find a spare pair of jeans for you.”

Jeans! I hadn’t worn jeans since high school. I was beginning to think I might be able to hang there until I found Arkie. Maybe street names explained it. Maybe no one knew him as Arkie.

The luxurious hot shower couldn’t last long enough for me. It was a shared bathroom with plenty of razors, different shampoos, and handwashed bras hanging from towel racks. Orchid said sweetbutts were supposed to have their own private floor in this Victorian building, but patch holders often violated that trust. In all, it sounded a lot like Cornucopia, difference being that women could talk back to men. When the hot water started running out, I stood naked before the sink and gulped the rest of the beer.

I could live like this.

Lights like a pinball machine still flashed in my skull, remnants of the fit, I supposed. A few thousand new muscles ached, and I observed the bloom of purple-yellow bruising on my shoulder. But still. It could be worse. Orson could never find me there. I had no cellphone. Afton had no doubt gone blathering she’d seen me by the side of the highway but there was no way in heck anyone would discern I’d been picked up by a biker from Flagstaff. I combed my hair slowly, almost taking pleasure in it, before rolling it into a bun and piercing it with a hairpin.

Orchid brought me fresh clothes that mostly fit. I had underwear, heavenly undies! The pants were a bit like I was waiting for a flood, and my rack seemed bigger than hers because the buttons on the bodice of the shirt were sort of stretched. But she loaned me a sports bra that reined it all in fairly well, and when I was done, I felt like a 1960s housewife.

Orchid sat on a mattress across from me, smoking a marijuana pipe. She offered me some, but I turned it down. Marijuana had never helped me forget where or who I was. Instead, I accepted some whiskey in a coffee mug.

“They let you drink in that joint?” she croaked, holding in the smoke.

“Oh, sure,” I said happily, as though already recalling a sunny childhood. “It’s one of the original nineteenth century tenets they reinstated. Cornucopia is straight Brighamite all the way. Men are required to have at least three wives to become exalted, to live as gods in the afterlife.”

Orchid made a raspberry. “Typical. How convenient for them.”

“Yes, I didn’t grow up there. I was sent there when I was eighteen. It’s hard for outsiders to grasp the justifications and, well . . . “

“Excuses?”

I smiled. “Yes, excuses they make for various things.”

“So you’re a Morbot.”

I’d heard that term before. “Yes,” I admitted, “I guess you could say that. I do what my husband tells me. I do postmortems on chickens. I’m—I was—a model farm wife, a one-woman production line. I swore his mother had been terrified by a candy box when with child, because he wanted me to wear these wide-brimmed straw hats covered with blue flowers. Like a real Navajo, I learned to clean and filet fish while he observed. I was his property, like Kelsey just said about Byron. I did what he told me.”

Orchid exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “So, you never had a regular job?”

“Not outside the walls, no. Do you?”

“Shit yeah I do. I’m a waitress at a nice Italian joint about ten blocks from here. I have to get dressed up, wear a uniform.”

That sounded fun to me. “I wanted to become a lawyer. But they choose your path for you, even the men. Well, not many men make it there to adulthood. They drop them off in the desert to wander, because we don’t need more men. Competition, you know.”

The more I told Orchid, the stranger my life of the past decade sounded.

She squinted at her pipe’s bowl. “Once you find your brother, you gonna become a lawyer?”

I had to scoff at that. “Well. If he’s a member of a biker gang I doubt he’s very rich. I’ll probably have to work, like you.”

“And go to school. And don’t call it a biker gang. It’s a club. A one percent club.”

“One percent club,” I echoed. “Are they all as . . . unkind as Byron?”

Orchid laughed now. “Unkind? That’s the worst thing you can think to say about that cretin? Let’s put it this way. He runs a puppy mill.”

“Yes, he said something about delivering a puppy.”