Halcyon Days
Words: 3370


This was all before Winnie died, you understand. About six or seven weeks before, unless I miss my guess. I remember it was still fall and the days were just getting so you’d have to put on a jacket before you went out. Winnie died in the winter. There was so much snow on the ground, John lost the third toe on his left foot running out in it for a doctor. Which, as it turned out, did no good after all.

Winnie dying seemed to change just about everything for us. Whether we admitted to it or not we all started measuring time in just two units: Before Winnie and After Winnie. I think, really, it just showed us the things that were already there. Made it so we were living in the world instead of playing pretend. We’d lost people before that, of course. John, who froze his toe off in the deep winter snow, had seen his whole family-Mom, Dad, two little sisters-killed. Throats cut like hogs at slaughtering time. And there wasn’t a one of us didn’t have a story just as bad or worse. But, up until Winnie, none of us in the inner circle had ever been seriously wounded. We were living what you might call a charmed life, or so it seemed. Winnie, lying in that gray bed with her own blood and spit and bile soaking the pillow underneath her, promised us that were not invincible.

That is not to say we didn’t have our fair share of close scrapes. We’d sit around the table nights and bare our scars in the lamplight, telling the stories of how we’d gotten them for the new kids. I myself had a pretty good knot of shrapnel in my left shoulder from a pipe bomb that’s timer I’d misjudged. Friendly fire, but it hurt like a motherfucker all the same. That night, we were actually patching up Clarence Allison, who’d taken what had turned out to be a somewhat lucky shot to the back of the knee. The bullet had tore through all the tender tissues and muscles in there that Maria might know the name for, but just looked like meat to me. And he went down like a ton of bricks. But the part that made it great, the part that made it miraculous was, as he was lying there, the goddamned spike who shot him runs up (chasing after Joshua, most like) and trips over Clarence and falls right on his fucking face. It was like something out of a movie. Clarence shot him with his own pistol and we got off scot free, laughing all the way.

We were still laughing, fit to bust a gut. Even Clarence was laughing, burying his face in a donated pillow while Maria rooted around in the remnants of his knee. He told me later he didn’t even feel it, just felt hot and numb, like when you’ve been sleeping on your arm all night and you wake up to find it all boneless and airy. Course, Maria had doped him to the gills, so I don’t suppose I suggest that you try the same and see what happened. “I think what I liked best,” Joshua pointed out, “was the elegant windmill he did with his arms on the way down. Very dignified.” This got a big laugh, and we all took turns re-enacting the fall, our movements growing gradually more exaggerated.

“Jesus Christ,” Maria muttered while John was pratfalling on the tile floor, “this whole thing would be a lot easier if you’d been standing up straight and he’d hit your thigh instead.”

“Oh gee,” Clarence’s voice was muffled from the pillow. “Next time I’ll be sure to get shot in a more convenient place. How about my ass? No complicated tendons in there. Do you have a preference as to which cheek?”

“Well, actually, your fat mouth would be favorite, if I get a vote,” Maria answered sweetly.

“Ah, the soothing sounds of lovebirds chirruping to one another,” Joshua said, batting his eyelashes like a flirtatious girl.

“I haven’t gotten to this part in the book yet,” Maria said, ignoring Joshua and wiping her forehead with a gloved hand. She left a streak of orange-y blood behind her.

“Now, you see, I don’t need to hear that shit,” Clarence complained.

“Well, then next time you wait more than four days after we get the medical textbooks in before you go and get your ass shot,” Maria pointed out. “You’re lucky I’ve read past the damn table of contents.”

“That’s me,” Clarence agreed, “lucky.”

All this time, the fifteen of us had crowded into the stockroom that, with the addition of a gurney and a bedpan, doubled as an infirmary, and Winnie was just standing back in the door. She had that look on her face that she got, with those big, staring eyes and her sad mouth, red and crinkled as a flower with deep frown lines on either side. The boys were always trying to get Winnie to have a good laugh, they’d tease her or tease each other, make faces and stupid jokes and she’d just look at them as if to say “that’s just fine.” But never even so much as a chuckle. Us girls were a bit subtler, we might offer to do her hair up nice, give her a magazine or a candy bar that we’d gotten in a relief shipment. And though her big, sad eyes always seemed grateful, she never so much as cracked a smile at us.

Joshua had had a good long think before taking Winnie on. She was awful young, for one thing. Only just sixteen years old. And she was, it was plain to see, all messed up in the head. We heard the story from our contact who’d helped get her and a small group of others under the age of eighteen out from one of the juvenile facilities. When Winnie was just eleven years old, she’d been taken from her family by a high ranking official who liked little girls far more than a grown man should. After a few years, when she started getting a woman’s body about her, he’d turned her over to the Council on Moral Matters, who’d charged her with crimes against nature and sent her to the Containment and Re-Education Facility. She’d come to us were her hair shorn and electricity burns on her skin in the tender, brittle place where the skull gets thin just up from your eyes. We never meant to keep her, just play safe house for a few nights until our man could find a more permanent settlement. But Winnie, as we found out, was kind of a genius when it came to shooting a firearm.

I’ll never forget the night we discovered that about her. She woke us all up with six rhythmic shots in close succession. We all burst out of our beds and ran to the lot behind the house, where she was standing in her borrowed nightgown, Joshua’s own pistol his dad gave to him stretched out in front of her (we still don‘t know exactly how she got hold of it). She had set out glass soda bottles on the wooden fence that carved our property out from the endless fields beyond it. There were ten of them in all, she had shattered six and, as we watched, she demolished the other four. And all this time, her eyes-I saw them myself-were closed tight.

“How the fuck did you do that?” Joshua said, while I reached out and took the pistol from her hands, which were nerveless and unresisting.

“He taught me how to shoot,” she said, and we all knew who she was talking about. “He liked to teach me tricks. It made him laugh. Like those bears at the circus that wear people clothes.” Seemed like it would have been better, somehow, if she had sounded bitter or angry. But she didn’t sound like anything at all. She was just relaying the facts.

“I meant the part about the closed eyes,” Joshua corrected gently. Winnie shrugged, looking briefly like a teenage girl for once.

“I’ve got a good memory,” she said.

At the end of the day, Joshua figured that the ghosts in Winnie’s eyes were the kind of thing we could fix, with patience and good cheer, and that we always needed a steady and accurate hand. She’d been with us for almost two years the night we cleaned up Clarence’s knee, and Joshua was still wondering if he’d made the right decision. As for me, Winnie’d saved my life more than once, and I wasn’t the only one either. It didn’t matter a whit to me whether or not she liked a joke.

That night, Lari was playing with the radio as usual. Joshua’d first got the thing from a shady black market contact who we just called Henderson, he thought we might be able to communicate with other freedom cells, maybe even get some foreign news broadcasts. Unfortunately, the thing was an unqualified piece of shit, it didn’t get anything but the most local of channels when it worked at all, which was almost never. Lari, though, fancied herself a whiz with machinery (and she did get that old jeep of mine up and running, so there may have been some truth to her notion) and she was always fucking around with the thing, usually getting nothing more than an earful of static for her trouble.

That night, though, she must have really had the magic touch. She got this station, it was local, but it must have been underground, because instead of the usual parade of false reports on the nature and outcome of various skirmishes and requests for prayers for the spikes, fighting a brave battle against the vile guerrillas, they were playing dancing music. It was nothing spectacular, all tinny like it was coming from a long metal tube, but we hadn‘t heard anything with a beat in half a year. It was that song that was so popular that year over the mountains, you probably remember it. Well, the original wasn’t in English, obviously, so instead of just playing the thing, as is, some joker tried to translate it with what was probably one of those little phrasebooks you get when you take a trip. “Great, we’re so fucked up that even the music has to be smuggled in,” Joshua used to say, but I could tell he liked it, it always made him smile in spite of himself.

In this song, there was some term of endearment in the chorus, something like sweetie or baby or the like. But the translator had chosen not to sub in one of those words and instead inserted the more literal “little duck.are my little duck, you are my little duck, today and tomorrow, you are my little duck,” went the chorus. We were, all of us, laughing like loons at this, when John starts singing along and swaying across the floor. We watched as he danced his way across the room to where Winnie was pressed hesitantly against the doorway. He stretched out his hand like a fine gentleman and she took it just like a lady and they spun around together, him jerking her back and forth zanily, a puppet with a drunk master. And then he sang to her, in a voice that was shockingly deep and very serious, “You are my little duck, you are my little duck, today and tomorrow, you are my little duck.”

And that was the first time any of us ever heard Winnie laugh. It was just a little sound, at first, you almost couldn’t tell it was there. It sounded like tiny bells. And then it grew louder and louder, it was high and joyful, I think she even snorted a couple of times. And none of us could help but laugh along with her. We sat there in that makeshift infirmary and laughed until hot tears ran down our faces.

We were never really all together like that ever again. There was a good month and a half between that night and the day Winnie died, but it was a busy month and a half. Joshua and I were planning the bombing of the new high-rise down town that was ostensibly a “bank,” but we had it on good authority it was actually a training facility packed with spikes and councilmen. Maria was busy with our inside contact, trying to hustle a group of sickly folks, wounded, over the border and also with Clarence, who’s knee never did heal the way it should. Maria had to take it three days after Winnie died. The rest of us just got all caught up in the thousand things that filled up the day, the little crises and victories and tragedies. I think if we had known how things were going to get we would have made more time, chosen nights in the kitchen shooting the shit and wasting candles over getting extra sleep. But then, that’s pretty much true of just about anyone, right? I mean, who wouldn’t change the things that were, if they could?

Winnie died because of the bank job, which went so bad wrong in a way that nothing had gone wrong for us before. Half the explosives didn’t go, but it was the three that went fifteen minutes too soon that really hurt us. I left Lari screaming in a stairwell with a load of masonry and glass piled on top of her. I couldn’t dig her out and her face was burned so bad, didn’t even look like any kind of face at all. A kinder and braver person might have shot her and spared her the pain. But I couldn’t stop thinking of her in the kitchen at midnight smearing peanut butter on crackers and punctuating her story with the knife in her hands. And I did some screaming of my own to drown out hers.

Jamie Lurch, Magnolia Dale, Preston James came out of there with bullets in them, wounds they wouldn’t recover from. Lari Morrison and Jan Diaz didn’t come out at all. I had some burns, Joshua broke his arm in a couple of places. Maria and John were unscathed, pristine. And we thought Winnie was, too. We thought that up until she started burping up red blood. She didn’t think it mattered, see. She didn’t think she needed to tell us about the spike she’d run into coming down the stairs, about the featureless black canister he’d had on his vest and how he’d sprayed it right in her face (covering his own face with his other hand. It must have been brand new, they hadn‘t even started issuing them masks yet. I like to think he got a little of it himself, not enough to kill him, maybe. Just enough to tear up the inside of his head). She thought it was hairspray, she told us. It had tasted sticky and chemical and fruity in her mouth.

The spray was brand new to all of us (since then we’ve gotten to know it well) we’d never seen a thing like it. In retrospect, we should have figured that they’d be monkeying around with better, more efficient weapons. The spray, why you can cover a whole city block in it and take out every man, woman and child inside without firing a single shot. I’ve seen it done. The spray attacks the body on a variety of fronts (even now, so many years later, we don’t know exactly how the shit worked on a chemical level. The spikes must have had some sort of terrible wizardry). First it breaks down the nervous system, the sufferer babbles wildly and jerks as his or her brain fires off random, desperate bolts of energy, dying violently. And then it ruptures the capillaries inside the body, filling up the organs-most notably the lungs-with blood. Winnie was drowning, right there in that bed in the storage closet, with not enough faculties to spell her own name or even take herself to the bathroom. It took six days. It might have dragged out longer, but Maria was both braver and kinder that I was.

“It’s the last of the morphine until the next shipment,” she said, “I suppose we’ll all just have to bite bullets for now.” Joshua was holding her hand, and Maria reached down to smooth out her hair and I watched from the doorway, frozen, as Winnie died, babbling words that weren‘t real words with a spreading yellow stain on the front of her nightgown. She was eighteen years old.

I don’t think any of us would admit it, but Winnie dying seemed to be the thing that turned the tables for us. Maybe we just lost something with her, heart, or something like that. There used to be a kind of fierce joy in it, almost like a children’s game. After Winnie, we just did it because we had to, because there was no other sort of life left to us.

I think that, before Winnie died, we thought we would win someday.

Clarence didn’t survive the operation to sever his leg. We were still out of morphine and Maria had to give him chloroform. Either she misjudged the dosage or his heart gave out on him, there’s no way for us to know. Maria sat there with the dead body all night and we could hear her all through the house, not even crying, just moaning. Like she was already a ghost.

John had insisted on going for a real doctor that night Winnie died. “We need somebody who hasn’t just read about it in a fucking book!” he’d shouted as he went. He never really forgave Joshua for not letting him go sooner, nor Maria for not saving Winnie. But, as it turned out, Joshua was right to forbid him, because that nervous, white-haired doctor shook his head over Winnie, took his leave and went right to the spikes to report us. They tossed the house a week later and took three of us, John included, off to the Containment and Re-Education facilities. We never heard what rightly happened to him. Once a body goes into the facilities, you generally don’t.

Oh, there were other houses, and other young men and women, but me and Joshua are just about all that’s left of the old guard now (Maria ate her gun about eleven years ago, two years after Clarence died). We would hear them at night, collecting down in kitchens and front porches, laughing and bullshitting, drinking bathtub whiskey and complaining about how bad it is. But we don’t ever join them, just leave them be.

We’re positively ancient by guerrilla standards and we don’t work like we used to. No more bombs for us, no daring shootouts. We work mainly with the inside man from the old days, who looks just like he did back that, right down to his neatly combed hair and geometrically exact bow tie. We shuttle folks out of the facilities, find places to hide them, take them over the mountains when we can. It’s a good life, even a peaceful one, in it’s way. And I can’t complain, because it’s the one I chose.

But I do think sometimes (more and more the older I get) about those days before Winnie. They were good days, happy ones, we were all filled up with righteousness and rightness. But I understand (more every day it seems) why they’re gone now. After all, the young always think they can change the world. But young folks can’t do anything but get old, and the world always spins just the same as it did before. It gets stuck in my head, sometimes, that song with the chorus about the little ducks and I dream about them, dancing across this little room that I share with Joshua. They look so impossibly young and so impossibly beautiful. In my dreams, Winnie laughs.

It sounds like she will never stop.