Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2) Read online

  I took a deep breath, all anger expended and replaced by a kind of exhausted regret. “Jake, you can’t make those kinds of decisions for us on your own. I understand that these things are important to you but you have to remember that Lizzy and I are in this with you, too. Bringing people back here is a really big deal. I don’t think I need to remind you…” I trailed off, not wanting to complete the thought; it felt petty and hurtful.

  He was nodding. “You’re…you’re absolutely right. It won’t happen again. I’m sorry.”

  I reached across the space between us (we sat in chairs facing each other in the library in front of the small fireplace; a place we usually went when we needed to discuss something serious and didn’t want Lizzy to overhear) and squeezed his shoulder, which had become noticeably thicker in our short time at the cabin.

  “Forgiven,” I said. “Just keep it in mind, kay?”

  He nodded again, staring into the cold ashes of the fire pit, falling deeper into his own private thoughts. Before he could go too far under, I asked, “So, what now?”

  He looked back up to meet my gaze and asked, “Huh?”

  “They’re here now. What do we do with them?”

  He breathed in and blew air out through his lips. “Well honestly, I thought they’d be helpful around here. We could spread a lot of work out among ourselves.”

  I started laughing despite myself. “Jake…there are sixteen of them! Who brings home sixteen people? Where are we going to put them all?”

  “I’ll admit I haven’t solved that problem yet.”

  “Well, we can’t stick them in the garage,” I said. “It’s getting down to the high 40’s in the evenings.”

  “Not without space heaters, no,” he agreed. He looked up at me. “We should probably get some space heaters the next time we’re in town. Winter isn’t far away.”

  “Okay,” I said, “Maybe that works for later. We have a problem right now, Jake.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He spent a few moments looking back into the ash pit and then said, “You and Lizzy take the master tonight. We can cram two people into your bed and another two into the guest room, which covers four. We can jam another six into the bunks in Lizzy’s room.”

  “Right, that’s ten people,” I said. What will you do with the other seven, including yourself?”

  “We have a few sleeping bags; we can spread the rest out over the couches and floor. I don’t have any problem sleeping in the easy chair; I end up falling asleep there most nights, anyway.”

  “This is gonna be so crowded. Nineteen people and just three bathrooms. I’m not sure the septic tank can take it.”

  “It’s just for the night…maybe tomorrow as well,” he assured me. “We can get this figured out. Hey, look, we haven’t even discussed this with them, yet. We might offer and have them tell us ‘thanks but no thanks’.”

  “We’ll see.” I was unconvinced. “So what about the food?”

  “Food?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Uh, yeah? What did we say we have right now? Eight months of food to pull us through the winter, right?”

  “Yeah, eight months plus maybe a bit extra before we should start growing our own.”

  “That’s eight months for three people. Or…” I did some math in my head, “…twenty four months for one person. What’s twenty four divided by nineteen?”

  “I…ah,” he muttered.

  “Exactly. We’re suddenly down to less than a month and a half of food,” I said. “What’s the plan for that?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “There are a lot more of us, though, if they decide to stay. We can scavenge a lot more at a much faster rate.”

  “Enough to make up for that many mouths?”

  “Well…I really have no idea. I suppose we’ll have to see how it goes and make some sort of projection. Billy was the numbers guy, not me.”

  “Yeah, well, you better find a replacement if you’re gonna be the new mayor,” I said, leaning back in my chair and crossing my arms.

  “Mayor?” He looked unhappy just saying the word.

  “Oh, yeah. If we’re going to do this, there can’t be any question in these peoples’ minds who’s in charge, here. Didn’t you read any of those books Billy left us? Someone has to be in charge. Usually, the turd floats to the top of the group naturally, but this started out as our home and it needs to stay that way. We can’t leave it up to natural group dynamics. Sorry, buddy: you brought them home. You get to be the turd.”

  He sighed: “I realize all that, certainly. But I’m not calling myself Mayor. Besides, a title like mayor implies the consent of the governed.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “I mean it suggests I was voted into position. As you say, we can’t let a vote happen here. We’ll have to play this more like they’re house guests than some sort of village situation. I’d suspect it will become reflexive for everyone after too long and we won’t have to keep tiptoeing around it.”

  “So how do you want to do this?” I asked.

  “Let’s go determine the leaders in their group and have a sit-down with them. Who was it, Edgar? That made that clumsy speech? I can’t imagine it’s him in charge; it felt like he was trying too hard to put himself out in front through that whole performance.”

  “I agree,” I said. “I saw some people roll their eyes, too.”

  “Good, but let’s make sure we invite him into the meeting anyway.”

  “Oh, why?” I asked.

  “Because if there are issues within their group I want to know about them. I need you there in a background position, watching everyone. You’re going to catch things I miss; you’re better at this than I am.”

  10 – Proposals and Opportunities

  Amanda

  Jake led us out of the front door, where he turned abruptly and went over to sit down next to the older woman and man on the porch (who I later learned were George and Barbara), striking up a quiet conversation with them both. People from the new group had spread out all over the immediate property. Elizabeth, who had helped to prepare the food and came out to eat with everyone soon after, was sitting down at the opposite end of the porch with two young girls. She had her deck of cards out (a gift from a friend met on the road) and was dealing between the three of them.

  There were a handful of people still milling around the tables, a giant of a black man among them holding a paper plate and plastic fork that looked tiny in his hands. He had what Jake later described to me as ‘the awkward posture of an overburdened frame’; basically, the man was so large that the weight of his body made him look like he was out of energy all the time. He didn’t walk around; he lumbered. He didn’t sit down; he eased into chairs with a groan. You could see it the most in his legs and also his feet if he went without shoes. He had long, skinny legs with knees that looked like they might fold in the wrong direction if he came down on them too hard. His feet looked spread out and mashed into the ground as though carrying the body above them had aged them prematurely. I felt physically uncomfortable whenever I looked at the man and, when he sat down, I always felt like I could breathe a little easier for him.

  Next to him stood about the most attractive woman I think I’ve ever seen in person. She was one of those people who looked so effortlessly beautiful that you felt like a troll just standing next to her. She was tall, probably the same height as Jake (who was just a hair above average for a man); with long, perfect, white legs exposed by a pair of shorts I never would have been brave enough to wear. And when I say her skin was white, you have to understand: it glowed. A lot of people with pale skin typically get blotchy in different temperatures, hot or cold, and sometimes appear like they’re breaking out in some sort of rash in extreme cases. This blotchiness, along with the usual tracing of visible blue veins just beneath the surface of the skin, is why the ability to tan is so desirable. For her, tanning was unnecessary. Her skin was smooth, even, and flawless. She had a mane of fiery red hair that fell just below h
er shoulders but most likely extended to the center of her back or lower if pulled straight. It was arranged in thick, wavy curls that most of my friends would have had to spend three hours with a curling iron to achieve; I had to imagine it happened on her naturally given that she had been living on a bus. I’m struggling for words to describe it; her hair was so thick that it stood out from her head in such a way that…headdress! That’s it; her hair was like a giant, Indian headdress! I would have killed for hair like that. My hair was basically straight and dark brown, which my mother claimed I got from my Indian heritage. I don’t know if that’s true or not; I do know that it thinned out and became even more useless after I had Lizzy.

  She stood chatting with a black woman who was more on my level: shorter, thicker, and darker. Her hair was pulled back into a stiff pony tail and it looked like she had been living hard on the road for some time, as we all did, but the miles, lack of beauty products, and grime could not hide the strength and quiet dignity that she carried. I liked her on sight and admired her for all of the reasons my instincts told me to disregard the other, prettier woman.

  I was startled by Jake appearing at my side, an annoying, unconscious habit that he still has and that others besides me have commented on. He called out into the open with a clear voice, “Gibs, Wang, and Edgar: could I beg a moment of your time, please?”

  The three men approached all wearing different levels of curiosity on their faces. If I had to assign ratings for intensity, I’d have to say that the Asian man (Wang) had the most guarded expression; the taller, bearded man (Gibs) was somewhere in the middle; and the final person, a dead ringer for Ichabod Crane (Edgar), looked like he had just been called on to address the president.

  Jake looked over at George, nodded, and asked, “Shall we?” The man called George pushed off from the low deck chair with the help of his cane and approached the front door, which Jake was holding open. Gibs, Wang, and Edgar followed into the house after George. Jake glanced over to the older woman left behind in the remaining chair and said, “Have him back in a minute,” before indicating to me that I should follow into the house. I noticed that Barbara didn’t smile at Jake or respond to his comment, which was odd. She seemed to smile at just about everything. Jake came into the cabin behind me and shut the door.

  The entry hall (what a fancy-pants would call a “foyer”) was nearly crowded with five people standing around in it. The three men looked about themselves in appreciation, obviously pleased with all of the masculine wood and furniture. I couldn’t blame them; I always did think Billy’s home was attractive, though I personally would have added a bit of color if I had been in charge of decorating. Jake and I had once considered changing a few things up but ultimately decided not to. The home was always going to be Billy’s place; we didn’t want to turn it into something he wouldn’t have been happy with.

  “Why don’t we head into the front room? There’s more than enough space in there for us,” suggested Jake. He slipped by all of them as he said this and walked into the formal front room where Jake, Billy, Elizabeth, and I had spent so many quiet evenings. He sat down in Billy’s old leather chair positioned just off to the right of the large fireplace and gestured to the rest of the seating surrounding the low coffee table. The rest of us filtered in and occupied various positions. Gibs, George, and Wang took the long sofa on the other side of the table while Edgar took a solitary chair off to the side of the room closest to the front door, a detail I was sure Jake caught. I sat down in the mate to Jake’s chair, which was located on the opposite end of the fireplace, placing Jake and I shoulder to shoulder with a span of probably six feet between us. The positioning was well arranged, giving me the ability to see everyone’s faces equally (Edgar’s was almost in profile). The whole environment struck me as a little surreal; I’d never been in anything like a boardroom meeting before but I imagined that this might have been pretty close.

  Without waiting for anyone to start asking questions, Jake said, “I’ve asked you all to meet with me in this way because I think it’s probably a good idea that we lay out everyone’s intentions before too much time passes. Bringing in the leaders of your group seemed the best way to do that; large groups can devolve into a lot of chatter.”

  I noted that when Jake said “leaders”, different people had different reactions. Gibs looked tired but resigned while Wang passively revealed very little. George looked surprised, as though he hadn’t expected to be lumped into such a group, and Edgar straightened up in his chair.

  “Well, that’s fair,” Gibs said as he leaned back into the couch. “What are your intentions?”

  I was curious how Jake was going to play this. Saying, “Hey, come live with us,” sounds a little nuts when you just blurt it out like that.

  “If it’s alright,” Jake responded, “I was hoping I could ask you to share what your plans were before I ran into you all in Jackson.”

  “That seems reasonable,” George said quietly. Gibs seemed to take a cue from this and nodded gently.

  “Okay,” Gibs said. “Our plans were fairly simple. Find a place that doesn’t suck, dig in, and scavenge for food and supplies.”

  “How has that been working out?” Jake asked.

  Gibs’s left leg began to bounce rapidly on the ball of his foot but he seemed not to notice; he met Jake dead in the eye. “Could be better.”

  “I’ll say we started strong but things got a bit harder as we went,” George supplied. “Got a lot harder, really.”

  “And you all started out together?”

  “No,” said George. “I had started out with Gibs and Tom, that’s Tom Davidson, in a sick camp down in Texas. This was when things had really started to go south, you understand; we just sorta nodded to each other one day, got up, and left. We ran into Oscar and his daughter Maria not long after that… Rebecca was out on the road.”

  “Rebecca is the redhead?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” said George.

  Jake said, “You just picked up the rest along the way?”

  “More or less,” Gibs said, wobbling his head back and forth. “We ran into Wang and his crew in Colorado Springs…that would be Jeff, Fred, Monica and Rose, Wang and Edgar here and…Kyle and Jessica.”

  “Jeff was the quiet one, wasn’t he? He didn’t say much while we were eating,” said Jake.

  “Yeah, but he’s alright once you get to know him,” said Gibs. “Doesn’t complain, carries his weight. Helps out with the kids, also.”

  “You said ‘Kyle’ and ‘Jessica’,” prompted Jake.

  “Yes,” Gibs nodded. “I lost them.” ‘I’ not ‘We’. His leg was drumming almost frantically. I was surprised no one pointed it out but I certainly wasn’t going to. My job was mostly to watch them and compare notes later with Jake.

  In the meantime, Jake nodded to himself and stood from his chair. He walked to a cabinet in the back of the room (up against the wall that was shared by the kitchen on the other side) and asked, “Can I offer any of you a drink?”

  “I’d love a vodka,” Edgar said hopefully.

  After a brief pause in which he turned back to consider all of us, Jake returned with a tray carrying six tumblers and a fresh bottle of Crown Royal. Placing the tray down next to the Chess set on the table, he began to remove the wrapping from the bottle. He made no comment at all regarding the fact that he brought back Canadian whiskey rather than vodka, met no one’s eyes as he poured. He didn’t even attempt an apology over having no vodka on hand, which would have been a lie anyway. He poured a couple of fingers’ worth into each glass, selected one from the bunch, and then settled back into his chair. He took the first sip and sighed, wearing his unreadable smile, and nodded to Edgar, who looked more than a little dazed as he reached out hesitantly to take his glass.

  Jake nodded to him happily and said, “It’s quite good.”

  Edgar looked at his glass as though he expected to find something floating in it. Apparently finding nothing, he looked up and s
miled around at the rest of us before taking a sip. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of whiskey, which is why I felt sympathetic when one of Edgar’s eyes squinted and he just managed to suppress a shudder.

  “It’s very good,” he agreed and Jake nodded again happily.

  I looked at the others and saw that Gibs wasn’t paying attention to the interplay at all, choosing instead to warm his glass between his hands. His leg was still running a hundred miles an hour and he appeared to be locked within his own black thoughts. George seemed amused by Jake; he sat with his hand covering his mouth but I could see a smile in his eyes. Wang looked completely confused by the whole affair.

  “That’s whiskey,” Wang said.

  “Hmm?” Jake asked in a distracted tone.

  “That’s not vodka. It’s whiskey.”

  Jake looked down at the bottle for a beat then back up at Edgar. “Oh, no! You did ask for vodka, didn’t you? How stupid of me; here let me take that. I’ll get you fixed up right now.”

  “Oh, well if you insist,” said Edgar.

  “I do,” Jake said as he snatched the glass from his hand. He disappeared back into the kitchen where we heard him discard the glass into the sink.

  He came back out and squatted down in front of the liquor cabinet. He called back to us over his shoulder, saying “Okay, you’ll need to pick one. I don’t really know anything about vodka.” He stood and approached the group with two bottles in his hand, one of which said “Tovaritch” across the front. The other was a terribly gaudy pink bottle that looked like it had been bedazzled near to death. It said “Alizé” along the front of its face.

  Edgar’s eyebrows pulled up high on his forehead and I briefly wondered if he was as put off by the bottle of disco vodka as I was. To my surprise, he pointed right at it and said, “That’ll do fine,” in a whisper that quavered.

  Jake’s expression didn’t alter in any way that you could see but, having lived with him now for months, I noticed his demeanor shift. His side of the room chilled slightly, though he continued to smile as if nothing had happened (nothing did happen as far as I could see). “As you wish,” he nodded, and turned to fill a glass. He returned to his chair, reaching out to hand the glass to Edgar before settling in, who took it carefully with both of his. He took a sip and looked intensely satisfied.