Campbell (18 page)

Tal was awake with the light on when she got back to their room, dressed and throwing stuff into a bag. He exhaled loudly with relief when he saw her. “Where the fuck were you? Did someone take you?”
 

“I just went to call my friend in the lobby. I’m fine.”

“You’re crying.” He looked at her face. “Is everything—”

“It’s fine,” she choked. “We’re…we’re going to go to Oklahoma. He’s got a friend there, and he’s going to meet us in a week.”

“Okay,” he nodded, stepping closer to her. “Why are you crying?”

She hadn’t cried much about Cole at home. She’d had a stern talk with herself a few days in, and convinced herself crying wouldn’t help. Here though, away from everyone, she felt like all she’d done was cry whenever she had a minute to herself.

“My brother,” she mumbled, avoiding his eyes. “I’m just worried about him…they’re…it’s not good, what’s happening to him.”

Tal looked at her, obviously unsure of what the proper response was. He hesitated, and she knew he was concerned about how she’d react if he hugged her.
 

He did it anyway.

“I lost brothers,” he murmured, holding her against him, despite some initial flinching. It was a careful hug and Lucy knew his intentions were purely supportive. “So I do know, even though it’s been a long time. You’ll be okay. Just get through each day until you’re with him again.”

Lucy pulled away and looked up at him, feeling the slightest bit less alone. “How many did you have?”

“Two. Adam and Rob. Fifteen and seventeen.”

“So close,” she whispered, wincing. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” he nodded thoughtfully. “Adam…We were really close. Everyone in my family, really.”

“Of course you’re the baby,” she said, a half smile through her tears. “I should have known.”

“And that makes you the middle, I’m guessing?”

“By ten minutes,” she said quietly as she pushed away from him, realizing something new about Tal Bauman. He was a hell of a lot stronger than she’d given him credit for. “Thanks…for that.”

“We should get some sleep,” he replied, returning to his side of the room. “Since we’re going to have to pimp ourselves for gas money to get to Oklahoma.”

“I’ll make sure you get what you’re worth,” Lucy said, smiling at the bed opposite her as she switched the light out. “And don’t touch me again.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Tal murmured, hoping he was lying. “Night.”

“Night.”

Chapter 11

February 2002

Fort Macleod, Alberta

“Well, I’m going to call it Campbell,” Bull joked, glancing at Lucy out of the corner of his eye. “It’s a better name than Fort Macleod, anyway. There aren’t any Macleods here, and the fort sucks.”

“I think we should call it something geographical, like they’ve done in the east,” Lucy piped up, looking up from her game of checkers with Angela Duncan. “Like North.”

“Campbell’s better,” Bull said, moving onto the floor beside her, their thighs brushing. “East isn’t going to bring everyone together. Kids in the west aren’t going to want to be part of East. Or kids in the north. If we’re all going to do this, we need to think big.”

“What if we just call ourselves Canada?” Cole replied, looking admirably at Bull, who seemed to be taller and more handsome every time he came to visit.
 

Lucy didn’t miss the way Cole looked at her boyfriend. She’d called him on it, and he’d confessed to having a crush on him. It had shocked Lucy at first. She didn’t know anyone who was gay, or even what it meant to be gay until Cole had told her he was. She wasn’t surprised that Bull made Cole feel similar to the way he made her feel. They’d shared feelings and emotions, for as long as she could remember. She knew from the amount of kissing that Bull seemed to want to do that he wasn’t going to reciprocate Cole’s feelings but it bugged her a little, the way Cole didn’t care that Bull was hers.

She’d never had someone that was just hers before.
 

“We’ve got some Americans interested. If you were American, would you want to be Canadian?” Lucy said, staring deadpan at her twin who was fixated on her boyfriend. He quickly looked away, and knew Lucy well enough to know that he could expect a lecture later.

“I don’t know,” Cole mumbled. “Maybe? I think a lot of Americans wanted to be Canadian.”

“Why would you think that?” Lucy countered sharply. “That’s not true at all.”

“Children, children,” Bull tisked, shaking his head and ruffling Lucy’s hair playfully. “I think Campbell is good. It’s not one person, and this town, it’s Campbell anyway.”

“And you really think we’ll all just work together, and everyone will be happy, and that’ll be the end of it?”

“No,” Bull laughed, shaking his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a start, and if we don’t start, someone else will.”

“Your kind are going to listen to me?” Lucy shook her head. “Yeah, right.”

“They’ll listen to me. We’ll just work together. You’re right; no one’s going to go for colonialism again, now that we know better.”

“What’s that?” Cole asked, sliding next to Angela around the checkerboard.
 

Bull sighed. “You know what? Never mind—”

“It’s when all the white people came and took everything from Bull’s people and didn’t give them anything back for it,” Lucy interrupted. “Right?”

“You’ve been reading the books I gave you?” Bull smiled at her.

“Yeah. I kind of hate myself a little more every day,” Lucy said, grinning back at him. “But I guess Mother Nature showed us all.”

Bull chuckled. “She’ll do that.”

Lucy had learned a lot from Bull in the short time they’d known each other. She’d never really understood the imbalance in her world until he’d talked about his family and the stories his grandfather had passed onto him about how his people had once lived. She’d learned a little about it in school, but it was nothing compared to having Bull tell her about life on his reserve or show her things like the place where the Blackfoot had once hunted buffalo by chasing them off a cliff, just a stone’s throw from Fort Macleod. “You want to go up to Head Smashed In again tomorrow?”

“Of course,” he replied, beaming as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

Andrew had gone north to visit some of the boys he’d met in foster care the night before, which left an incredibly nervous, but trying to play it cool Lucy alone with an incredibly anxious, but always cool, Bull. Lucy tried to stay up as late as she could, hoping she’d either find some way to explain that even though a few of the twelve-year-olds they both knew were having sex, she wouldn’t be, or that they’d both simply fall asleep and it would never come up.
 

She had no such luck when Bull followed her into her room much later that night.
 

“We’re not doing it,” she said, raising her eyebrows at him. “Ever.”

His face dropped. “Ever?”

She shrugged. “I’m…I’m not sure I want to.”

“Well, I don’t think you have to decide at eleven.” He tugged off his heavy wool sweater to reveal his muscular frame. “And I don’t know why you think that’s what I want from you. I’m not sure I’m ready yet either. I’m barely twelve. You’ve seen all the girls around with swollen bellies. Who needs that?”

“What do you want from me?” she asked curiously, changing into her flannel pyjamas behind the bedroom door.

He gave a small shrug and smiled as he climbed into her bed. “I don’t think I have to decide that either.”

September 2012

Somewhere just east of Old Oklahoma

“So you trust this guy that’s sending us to some place called Grove? It’s not some elaborate trap? He’s not the rat?”

“Bull is not the rat. Bull is…” She looked up thoughtfully. “He’s…we share a brain sometimes. He’s an old boyfriend.”

Tal raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t imagined Lucy gushing over anyone. “And here I thought—”

“Oh, you thought right,” Lucy quipped. “And my only boyfriend. We were eleven. Twelve maybe. And then we were friends, and now we’re still friends. Because we don’t sleep together.”

“Right,” Tal nodded. “Because sex makes people—”

“Crazy.”

“I was going to say ‘hate each other’, but crazy works.” He shrugged, leaning against the car where they’d run out of gas, somewhere along the highway. “I guess we walk?”

Lucy gave a dull nod. “I guess so.”

It was a nice day; the sun was shining, and the sky was blue forever. On either side of them, scraggly bushes filled fields that had likely once been wheat.

“It’s like we’re the only two people in the world,” Lucy said, watching one foot move in front of the other. “We could be. Everyone could have died.”

“Why us? Why would we live, if everyone died?” Tal squinted into the sun.
 

“Fate? Blind luck?”

“How do you stop people wanting…things? If you’re all for your communist—”

“Socialist.”

“Whatever. If you’re a socialist, how do you convince yourself you don’t want to be on top?”

She smiled mischievously. “Oh, I’m always on top. Don’t get mixed up there. The extremes are just less extreme. I make a good salary and I don’t want for anything. ” She looked down at her ratty t-shirt. “Except maybe now. A new bra would be the bee’s knees.”

He smirked at her. “That’s an expression I haven’t heard in a while.”

“I’m old-school, Tal.” She scuffed her foot along the pavement. “There are no gulags in Old Canada. No sad, sad communist faces in line for bread. Shit just works.”

“Campbell: Shit Just Works. It’s like a dream marketing slogan.”

“Tell me more about you,” Lucy said abruptly, changing the subject.
 

“What do you want to know? We’ve probably got another twelve hours of walking ahead of us, so make it good.”

“What do you like to do, when you’re not ordering kids to do your bidding?”

Tal shook his head. “I just handle the money. I like money. I don’t have anyone doing my bidding. I like to bike. And read mystery novels, and pretend I’m going to law school like my parents did by reading their books. I have a garden—”
 

“What do you grow?”

“Everything. Every inch of yard that isn’t the pool—”
 

“Of course you have a pool,” she groaned

“It’s so much work to upkeep,” he tisked. “Anyway, we—”

“Who’s we? Not Connor,” Lucy shook her head. “He’s got that no-fresh-food look that kids get. It’s like extended scurvy.” She shook her head with disgust. “I hate kids like that. You’d think they were still twelve.”

“My cousin, Leah. We do the garden together. She does it mostly, because she’s around more. Anyway, we grow everything. We always had an avocado tree, but we got seeds for a bunch of other stuff early on. A lot of what we eat comes from there. I like real food.”

“See, you’re practically socialist anyway,” Lucy joked. “You should overthrow Connor and start promoting backyard gardening. It could be a whole movement.”
 

Tal sighed. “Kids are so lazy. I wanted to, in the beginning. I convinced everyone to give tax breaks for gardens and try to trade things, but no one did it.”

The smile on Lucy’s face was infectious. “You did that?”

“Sure,” Tal shrugged, his garden pushing days a distant memory. “But like I said, it didn’t catch on.”

“I think we’re all a little older and wiser now. Maybe it would catch on. California people are pretty laid back, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know. Am I laid back?”

“You’re more laid back than me,” Lucy said, peering down the road. “I really thought someone would have driven by us by now.”

“Do you really want to get in a car with someone around here?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t want to walk to Oklahoma. I think we could fight again if we had to.”

“What happens when it gets dark?”

“I guess we take shelter somewhere and wait for morning.”

Shelter came in the form of an abandoned bungalow by the side of the road with a collection of feral cats in the attached garage. Luckily for Lucy and Tal, whoever had abandoned the house had locked up which had kept the cats out.

“I hate cats,” Tal muttered, as an orange tabby swiped at his leg. “We had a dog when I was really little, but then we never got another one.”

“We’ve got cats around,” Lucy said, hissing at a patchy grey one as she shooed it away. “They serve a purpose. Maybe you just haven’t met a good one.”

They carefully broke a window and went in, the last light of the day providing them with a bit of a view of the space. The power was off, which pointed to the residents having been older and probably not surviving very long, since there would have had to be a functioning power company after their death to disable the service due to unpaid bills. Most households with kids had kept power, although they’d had to figure out some repair techniques over the years.
 

“This place is dusty and a little creepy,” Lucy whispered, peering around the corner into a bathroom she assumed wasn’t functional. “I hope the old people aren’t still here.”

Tal cringed at the thought of finding anything decomposed. Nothing was more disgusting than the grey, stretched skin and hollow expressions of the dead. “We used to find them all the time when we’d be scavenging.”
 

“We dumped a lot from our town in a field after that first winter and burned them. The ground was too hard to bury them, and it just seemed like a lot of useless work.”

Nodding in agreement, he picked at some of the old wallpaper in the living room. “I know they burned a lot where we were. We buried our family. I’m glad we could do that.”

Lucy walked into what seemed to be the master bedroom and they both exhaled at the neatly made bed, free of corpses. “Let’s hope they’re not anywhere else,” she muttered, peeking in the closets. “Hey, there are clothes in here. Lots of clothes.”

Tal joined her by the closet. It was full of very neatly folded stuff; pretty dated, lots of plaid and denim, but stuff nonetheless. “Let’s find something that fits.”

“It’s going to be pretty dusty—”