• • •
The next morning, as I slowly scraped food into my mouth from my tray in the staff cafeteria, I let my ears play this way and that. The White Palace was buzzing like a beehive opened by a bear.
While I slept, two churchmen, a matron, and four troopers had called on the White Palace with a summons for Elaine Maynes. She was ordered to appear for an examination into corruption and malfeasance somewhere outside the Coal Country. I was unable to find out what authority, exactly, ordered the removal, but it must have been either the Church or one of the security organs of the Georgia Control.
Needless to say, she was never seen in the cool halls of the White Palace again. A nephew of hers moved up and took over her job in distribution, and the Maynes Conglomerate moved on.
Maynes didn’t travel that day, or the next. On the seventh day after her removal, Home brought me up to his room. It smelled like a ferret cage, and liquor bottles in various states of emptiness lined the dresser, floor, and tables, precisely spaced as though about to be toppled in a chain like dominoes.
We succeeded in dragging him into the shower. MacTierney scrubbed while I held him, with Home trying between shouts to force a little instant liquid breakfast into his mouth. I wanted to suggest using a funnel at one end or the other—I’ve been told that the sigmoid colon is capable of rudimentary digestion—but I held my tongue. Not for the last time.
With the loss of his sister, Maynes lost all interest in doing his duties. He affirmed—and increased—the punishments handed out, and word spread quickly that they no longer wished to appeal to the Bone.
When Maynes started prowling the roads as the vocational schools let out, surveying the girls heading home or to their paying jobs, MacTierney quit on him and asked for reassignment.
“I didn’t sign up to chauffeur a pussy patrol,” MacTierney told Home.
I became the official driver. Maynes, of course, would still ride in back, and Home would get out, show his security identification, gun, and the Maynes business card, and offer a ride home to whatever girl Maynes chose.
Word seemed to spread in that mysterious fashion of Coal Country, and within ten days or so, virtually no school-aged girls could be found walking along the roads. They took l
onger, less obvious routes or hitched rides hidden in delivery vehicles or other sanctioned transport. Maynes took to plunging into the larger towns where women selling themselves could be found, always hunting for the freshest-looking specimens he could find.
I sometimes found it difficult to maintain my composure as an indifferent nonhuman, and at night I would lie on my bedding—they still hadn’t managed to find me a bed that fit—and argue with myself over just how much responsibility I bore for Maynes’s depravities. The girls were physically mature enough, biologically speaking, and the live-in physician and nurse the Maynes family employed ensured he wasn’t passing around diseases, but there is more to life than the physical being. The body heals much more easily than the mind and spirit.
I consoled myself that the locals were growing used to seeing me behind the wheel of a Maynes vehicle. At first, they pointed and nudged and gaped. Eventually this turned into shrugs from some and casual waves from others. This would make my escape easier, once the Coal Country folk grew accustomed to seeing me squeezed behind the wheel of one of the Maynes family transports. Soon, I’d be able to pass without remark.
If anything, Maynes’s habits would help my escape. The locals no longer sought to flag him down as he drove through the towns, or to offer him a slice of Mrs. Whoever’s famous rhubarb pie, seeking the powerful man’s intercession on some family or business difficulty. Even the city constables and rural troopers, who formerly wanted Maynes to know their names and their faces, didn’t want to approach close enough to catch a glimpse of what might be going on in the back of the bus.
At the White Palace, a new generation was eager to take charge and grew increasingly contemptuous of Maynes. We would pull around the house, and the family lot attendant and doorman did not exactly jump to attend to the Trekker and team Maynes. The vehicle was washed far less frequently as well. Sometimes I’d find profanities drawn into the dirt on the windows.
Before, there’d been talk of Maynes taking on a trip to Kentucky to visit one of the legworm clans friendlier to the Kurian Order and to set up a more-regular trade arrangement (I understood that the mine owners were clamoring for cheap, plentiful legworm flesh to feed their laborers, and legworm hides made durable and breathable work wear). Home and MacTierney had been talking about the challenges and opportunities of the trip, but all the talk had vanished along with Maynes’s sister.
My thought was that they hoped some outraged father would get hold of a firearm or a vehicle big enough to cause a fatal collision with Bone’s bus.
We’d leave well after everyone was up and working in the morning, drive to some town where Maynes would sign off on a change of management or a denial of appeal, and then we’d prowl the back streets looking for desperate women. Most had a sad story they wanted to tell someone in the Maynes clan, but Home would cut the talk off with some combination of threat or nasty joke: “Meat’s supposed to be going into your mouth, not words coming out, sweetie.”
They did pay. Sometimes Maynes even threw in bonus rations or appliance coupons that were supposed to be saved for the most productive workers in the Maynes Conglomerate. I expect word did get out now and then that the bonus washing machine that some shift foreman had sweated all year to earn ended up shoved into the bra of a prostitute.
So at night we’d return to the White Palace. Maynes and Home were often in the back, rattling around with the empties, drunk and swapping miseries or discussing the highlights of their latest sexual conquest like athletes relaxing in the locker room post-match. I’d never been so grateful that I was expected to stay up front and watch the road.
“Bet that old whore could have taken Hickory,” Home said.
Maynes sucked down the backwash of a beer and dropped the empty. “Wouldn’t mind seeing that. Her eyes popped just a little at every stroke. Bet they’d bug out with him.”
“Never seems interested in human women,” Home said. “I heard in Chicago they got a Grog show. So some of them must know what to do.”
“Coal Country girls probably not hairy enough. We should try Jersey.”
“That or he’s as queer as he is big.”
“Maybe he’s a eunuch. There was talk of fixing him if he got into fights with the others, but he’s been quiet.”
• • •
When thinking over my anecdotes of my time in the White Palace, few of them are humorous. There has to be a certain amount of relaxation and camaraderie for humor to take root, and for me, the White Palace held neither. Living in the stables no doubt cut me off from many routines and friendships that might have developed. This was just as well, because I might have had to do some harm in engineering my eventual escape.
Embarrassing moments may be funny, and my most embarrassing one came shortly after the lecture at the Youth Vanguard College. It was shortly after the presentation to the Youth Vanguard that someone on high decided to get a reproductive semen sample from me. So I was returned to the vet with the nervous ticks. This time, he had a young woman assisting him. She had the look of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors.