South Village (Ash McKenna) (6 page)

“Sure.”

Neither of us move.

“What?” Tibo asks.

“Something feels off,” I tell him. “Can’t shake it.”

“Do you remember what happened when you got here?”

He blinks at me. I shrug.

“I asked you to be our head of security, because that seemed to fit your skillset,” he says. “You refused. You told me, ‘I don’t do that shit anymore.’ Your words exactly. Do you regret your choice?”

“No.”

“Then don’t act like you do. Gideon is in charge and you need to respect that. So please, for the sake of my own peace of mind, don’t go running around here causing trouble. Not everything is a conspiracy.”

“You told Ford you trusted me.”

Tibo pauses. He gazes out through the trees. “I misspoke. I should have said I know you more than anyone else here.”

We part. The sting of his words following me.

That, and the little bit of rope.

I
t’s steam-room humid inside the kitchen. The battered stock pot, big enough to fit a small child—if you’re into morbid systems of measurement—is bubbling on the cast iron stove. Aesop is shirtless, cutting aromatics. The pots hanging from the rack over his head sway in the breeze of the window fan. I click the button on the top of the boom box in the corner of the kitchen, hope the batteries are holding out. Kurt Cobain’s voice comes blaring out. “Come As You Are.” That’ll do.

“What’s for dinner?” Aesop asks.

“You’re the boss.”

Aesop points the knife at me. “You choose tonight.”

“Why’s that?”

Aesop puts down the knife and leans against the counter. “I know you’re leaving soon, but you wanted to learn how to cook. Fine. You need to do more than just prep.”

I step around Aesop, into the cupboard, where I take a pull from my whiskey stash and pick a couple of blank cans at random. Root around in the cluttered utensil drawer for a can opener that works, passing over the three that don’t. Getting people to throw shit out around here is impossible. I open four cans of beans—a mix of red kidney and black. Next up, two cans of green beans and one of baby corn. I step into the narrow hallway that leads into the storage area. The wall is covered with scraps of paper. Some of them clean sheets of computer paper, some of them receipts, some of them torn off cardboard boxes. All of them covered with recipes, from past cooks, or guests, or staffers. Family secrets and favorite dishes handed down over the years. I scan them, looking for some inspiration, and finally find it on a post-it sticky on the far end of the wall.

“We still got some potatoes?” I ask Aesop.

He doesn’t stop chopping. “Yup.”

“You said you made some good mashed potatoes out of vegan butter and almond milk, right?”

“Passable. Browned up under the broiler, they come out pretty good.”

“All right. Veggie shepherd’s pie. We’ll throw in some tomatoes and zucchini from the garden. Plus some thyme and mushrooms. Kale salad on the side with some of that mustard vinaigrette you made last week. Given the atmosphere, I think we ought to get as close to comfort food as we can.”

“Now you’re thinking like a chef.”

There’s a sack of potatoes in the corner of the cupboard. I drag it over to the counter next to Aesop, slice it open, pile potatoes on the cutting board, and get to work. Toss the finished potatoes into a large plastic mixing bowl and the peels into the compost bucket.

“So what happened?” Aesop asks.

“Pete fell.”

“Something happened. You’ve got a look.”

“I don’t know. It’s weird.”

Aesop pushes the chopped onions into another mixing bowl, comes back with a basket of tomatoes and sets them down on the cutting board. “What’s weird?”

“This stays between you and me.”

“Of course.”

“I mean that.”

“I know.”

I put down the peeler and a half-peeled potato and peek out through the open door, make sure we’re alone. “I looked at the rope. It looked like it had been cut.”

“You think someone killed Pete.”

“I don’t know what I think.”

“What did Tibo think?”

“That I’m not a rope expert. And the sheriff looked at it and it didn’t seem to catch his interest. I’m wondering if maybe I’m just… I don’t know. I have a habit of overthinking things.”

Aesop takes tomatoes out of the basket, stacking them behind the cutting board. “It begs the question of
why
someone would kill Pete. Maybe you should start there.”

“I don’t have a good answer.”

“What do you know about Pete?”

“Nothing, really.”

Aesop takes a few cloves of garlic, lines them up on his cutting board, lays his knife over them, and slams it with the flat of his palm. The counter shakes. When he pulls the knife away the garlic is mangled. He pulls off the paper skin and dices what’s left. “You do know Pete didn’t want Tibo in charge anymore, right?”

“I had no idea.”

Aesop doesn’t take his eyes off the cutting board, his knife flying through the garlic. “You really don’t know anything about that?”

“I don’t pay attention to that kind of stuff.”

“Get ready for a lesson in hippie politics. In communities like this, some people get all worked up about ownership creating a hierarchy, and the only fix is for the hierarchy to be eliminated. In this instance, Pete and a couple of other people here wanted Tibo to have an open deed for the land. Whoever wants to be on it could be on it. That way everything is shared and equal.”

“Who else?”

Aesop stops chopping, looks up at the ceiling. “Marx, obviously. Magda and Gideon too. Maybe Job?”

“I didn’t know any of that.”

“Well, sit outside and talk to someone once in a while. You’ve been here two months and I don’t think you’ve spoken to anyone but me and Tibo for more than five cumulative minutes. I don’t take this personally, but I know you only talk to me because we work together.”

Shrug. “I’m not a people person. And I talk to Sunny and Moony sometimes.”

“You talk to them because they’re pretty and they do porn.”

“That’s not true.” I finish the potatoes on my board. Doesn’t look like enough, so I grab a few more out of the sack. “Given this, that would sort of make Tibo the main suspect, then.”

“Well, maybe yes, maybe no,” Aesop says, taking a bundle of thyme off the herb basket hanging over the sink, meticulously separating the leaves into a small glass bowl. “It’s not like there was this big uprising. No one was marching on his hut. There was a petition, but there’s always a fucking petition. That’s as far as it went.”

The heat is making the back of my throat feel swollen and thick. I grab a mason jar off the rack over the sink and turn on the filtered faucet. It comes out in a weak trickle through the greywater system’s filter. Even though the water is clear, it tastes like rocks.

I finish the last potato, toss it into the bowl, and dump the entire thing into the boiling water, careful not to splash. “Did you salt this?”

“No.”

The salt well is empty so I go into the cupboard, get the box of kosher salt. Fill up the well, then toss in a handful. Give it a good stir and glance at the clock. Fifteen minutes ought to do. I grab a few zucchini out of the veggie basket and slice. “This kind of thing doesn’t seem to rise to the level of murder.”

“Definitely not. Jesus, don’t you know where you are? There was talk of building a new outhouse, but the spot Job picked was too close to an active anthill. There was a two-hour discussion, after which the outhouse did not get built.”

Sigh. “Maybe I am overthinking it.”

“I got nothin’.”

I reach down, feel the outline of the arson manual in my pocket. I consider asking about it, but Tibo asked me to get rid of it, not advertise it.

There’s not much else to say and there are hungry people to feed, so we dig into the work. Once the potatoes are ready I dump them into a clean pot and go at them with the vegan butter and almond milk. I stop before I think I should. Mash potatoes too much and they get gluey. When I’m finished they’re a little rough and chunky. They’re not perfect. There’s no substitute on this earth for milk and butter, but at least no one will starve. They’ll just be slightly less happy than they could have been.

We get the casserole-ish thing into three sheet pans and into the oven to bake down for a little while, and then go after the salad. We keep it simple. Lots of kale, some dried cranberries and slivered almonds. I stop periodically to douse myself in water, or to fill up another mason jar, or to nip at my whiskey. It can get dangerous in here real quick if you don’t stay hydrated. I learned that lesson during the first real heat wave I was here for, when I almost passed out face-first into a ripping hot cast iron skillet.

Once we’re done with the salad I realize the tape player isn’t working anymore. I slap the side of it and nothing happens. Batteries are probably dead. Or else the ancient thing, arrived here from parts unknown, finally died. I’ll have to wait for the next run into town to get a package of D batteries to find out the answer.

The massive bowl of salad takes up half of the chest fridge. I am a fucking sweat monster. And I’m exhausted. It’s a mix of the brutal heat and being up so early, before the sun even came up, to catch a ride up to Atlanta from a departing guest. That nap on the car ride back cut into it a little, but I need a shower and a change of clothes before dinner tonight.

Aesop seems to sense this. He nods at me. “Go ahead and get cleaned up. I’ll handle the rest. Figure we’ll ring the bell in an hour?”

“Perfect.”

Soon as I step out of the kitchen I feel cooler. The air temperature is probably 85 to 90 degrees out here, but at least it’s not standing next to a stove radiating heat like the surface of the fucking sun. I head in the general direction of home and realize I’d probably be better with a shower first. I climb onto the boardwalk path. After walking a bit, when I’m sure I’m alone, I hop off the path and take a quick piss against a tree, keeping an eye out for fire ants.

There are two shower facilities, on the remote ends of camp, before the forest drops off into uninhabitable swampland. They’re both the same. A cross between a cabana and a log cabin without a roof, wooden poles sticking into the air, the inside a maze, the whole thing decorated with a mosaic of tile and broken glass. There are twists and turns offsetting the sinks and the tubs and the standing open-air showers, so multiple people can use the facilities and everyone gets a little privacy.

The dartboard out front of the cabana has a pink plastic dart sticking out of the “shower” section. The other two sections, “tub” and “sinks,” are free. I stop and wait, let whoever’s in there clear out.

A few minutes pass and Sunny appears, floating down the steps, stretching her arms over her head, a towel wrapped around her waist. Red hair in a long wet ponytail hanging down her back, immense breasts bare and beaded with water.

She is what The Commodores meant by a brick house.

I smile at her, keep my eyes above the neckline.

“Hi, Ash,” she says, taking the dart out of “shower” and sticking it back onto the corkboard.

“Ma’am.” I nod my head at her. She flashes me a smile so sharp it could cut glass, and wanders off, down the wooden pathway.

Good lord. I worked in a strip club for a little while so I know how to keep my decorum around beautiful topless women, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

I take a dart, stick it in “shower,” head into the main room, where I strip down and toss my clothes onto a shelf. I grab a bottle of biodegradable soap and step onto the shower platform, which looks out over a vast stretch of empty forest. Pull the chain for the shower and a middling stream of lukewarm water pours out, brought over by the nearby lake and river system. The water and a slight breeze serve to cool me down. I soap up and rinse and stand there, look out at the sunlight cutting through the trees.

I thought Portland was green. This is green in a way I didn’t know a place could be green. The air feels cleaner, like it’s constantly being filtered. So far from home, too. The way it smells and the sound of it. Standing here front of this great open space, this may as well be all there is to the world.

It’s kind of nice.

But things only stay nice for so long.

Maybe Tibo is right. I loved Chell too hard. She loved me but not the way I loved her. When she died I lost myself in wanting to punish the person who did it. And look what it cost me. My home. My friends. Not that they ran me out of town, but you can’t do so many dumb things strung together and feel like you’re still welcome.

I went to Portland, figuring I’d try a change of scenery, and made a mess there, too.

So here I am. Standing on the edge of the world, running away from one dead body, smack into another one.

“Hey.”

I turn to find Gideon standing on the other end of the shower platform. The tall lanky fuck, with his stupid fucking hemp necklace and scraggly goatee. Also, he’s naked.

“Can I join?” he asks.

I pivot a little to shield my bits. “Uh, no?”

“Didn’t you ever do the group shower in high school? It’s no big deal. You’re wasting water standing there.”