10
As they drove to Jack’s place Jo leaned against the door and wondered, as she had many times since agreeing to help ImPass, what it would be like to learn, at an early age, that you were meant for something. To have your family, or whoever—for Jo imagined Che growing up surrounding not by loving, doting parents but by a disciplined team of experts—eager to see you leave, pushing you off to meet your destiny, rather than coddle you and keep you near. Did he have believers ready to take up his cause? Micah had spoken only of scattered followers, mostly groups like A-Wall whose response, only half- organized and without resources, wouldn’t be difficult to quell once word had spread that the revolutionary clone had been captured.
The window felt cool against her forehead, and she remembered something she was taught in high school: that the sensation of cold was really heat escaping one’s body. The glass itself is cool, yes, but it’s a loss of something, not a presence, that is responsible for the feeling in the skin. Jo had dropped out of high school the summer before her Junior year, or she might know more about this, but it didn’t seem counterintuitive that the feeling of cold would represent loss. Of course, she thought, recalling Desmonda’s fire, heat could mean loss too.
Jo decided that she had better limit her thinking about Che’s plans. He stood little chance of making it across the border without being apprehended; Micah had been quite clear about that, and she believed him. He’d told her his capture was inevitable whether she—or Jack for that matter—helped them or not. Imagining the revolutionary free, therefore, only added to her feelings of guilt. Jo pulled her head back from the glass and sat up straight. They were moving through the night quickly, taking the soft turns too hard, the dips and rises with a tequila-fueled abandon. Jack was talking about their run-in with Javelinas during their first year in Arivaca, and it transported her back to those early days. She had still felt entirely unwelcome, then, but their encounter with these small, strange-smelling hogs had actually changed her impression of the place, its intentions, its animosity.
“God, that clicking,” she said.
Having grown up in LA, Jo had never been surrounded by wildlife in quite that way. Running through a grounded flock of seagulls at the beach barely counts as an encounter with nature; and more importantly, it doesn’t challenge the basic food-chain. Waking up to that horrible clicking, that’s exactly where Jo’s mind had gone: the beasts, she’d thought, clearly wanted to eat her. Weren’t hogs omnivorous? She hadn’t told Jack this at the time because he seemed simply annoyed, not frightened for his life, but it wasn’t until she’d determined that they were protecting something that she could let go of this dark and unfounded thought.
“We realized there was a pregnant female among them,” Jo said, “and they were just protecting her. But it was scary. I couldn’t walk out of the house.”
It seemed foolishly common to her now, but to understand that in a place of scarce resources animals, not to mention everything else, will resort to extremes to protect what they have came as a great revelation at the time.
She listened as Jack continued his story, but was now thinking only of her little Alex. She hadn’t spoken to him in almost 24 hours now—the first time they’d been apart since his birth four and a half years ago. She thought of him in the muted green and blue room at Childrens Hospital. They’d given him games to play, and she’d left him with books, but there was no getting around his solitude. Jo’s body craved her child as though she were going through withdrawal. She hurt with it. She tried to follow Micah’s recommendation, to turn her separation anxiety into resolve, but she was unused to willfully tricking herself like this, and could not see a path to escape her own heart.
“I was right, in the end,” she said. “They moved on.”
The car suddenly slowed, jerking her forward, and she looked ahead to see bonfires across Warsaw Canyon Road from Jack’s property. It lifted her spirits immediately. With everything going on, she’d completely forgotten about the protests. Despite putting Jack on edge, they’d always been a comfort to her. There was something about their nearly passive silence that had made her feel safe, as though they’d come as guardians, sentries against some unseen or imminent threat. The bright flames from their fires leapt into the darkness and disappeared, spirited away into the cool air. She suddenly longed to be among them, to be under stars and dancing, but as the car grew closer she saw that the mood was not light. This was no celebration. The dozen, maybe two dozen men and women walked slowly between the nearby tents, or stood close to the flames with fixed expressions and children at their feet, curled within blankets. The only quick, playful movement was from a dog, and she watched it dart through shadows until, right as they began to turn off the road, it crossed in front of a fire and she saw that it was Rockette.
“Where are the protest signs?” Micah was saying. “I’ve never seen a protest with no signs.”
“They never have them,” said Jo. “They’re always just there, mostly silent. It’s like they’re waiting.”
“Pretty eerie, if you ask me.”
Jo could understand Micah’s reaction. They were eerie, she supposed, in the way that all unknown things can be.
They parked near the path to Jack’s house, and she wondered at Micah’s ability to seem so at ease around a man he was deceiving. She also wondered about Jack. She’d half-expected him to guess at their motive right away in some spark of desert magic. She certainly hadn’t expected the two to get along. They got out and stood under the unlimited night sky.
“What’s a cockle, anyway?” Jo asked.
Micah raised his head to the stars. “Cockle doodle doo!” he cried. They moved single file down the path in silence.
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