Chapter Five
Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.
—Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Rafferty was five years old and playing with a circle of stones in the sun. He sat inside the circle of shiny river stones when a spring shower caught him and he heard the first dry rattle of wings rise with the heavy wet spatter of the drops. Thousands of huge, bronze-colored bugs seethed out of the ground and unfolded their brittle wings.
None of the things attacked him, but they rasped out an unpleasant scrape against the air when they flew, and when they landed on Rafferty, their stiff, stilt-like legs scratched his neck and hands. The neighbor lady screamed, and other screams echoed down the avenue of high, bright buildings.
Verna Tekel, the neighbor, scooped him into the heavy folds of her body and grunted him to her house, praying under her breath the whole way in all three of the languages that she spoke. Hers was the dark house of mystery, forbidden to him and the other children. Dark-eyed strangers came and went at odd hours, happy people for such a dark house. They parked colorful trucks and huge house-vans right in the yard that separated her house from Rafferty’s place, right where the bugs now swarmed.
They lived inside the vans, and the walls of the outsides rippled with colored pictures, advertisements, and news. Strange music rode the breezes from Verna’s house at night, music that stirred something in Rafferty, like the language she spoke stirred something. Other people made fun of it, always behind her back, but to Rafferty it sounded familiar. He usually knew what she meant.
A design had been burned into the back of her freckled hand, the number “8” lying on its side. He had seen it on some of the people who visited her, people whose darkness contrasted her freckled, pale skin and light, close-cropped hair. When she had visitors, other neighbors stayed indoors and locked up. They hired these dark men to fix things or to invent things or to tell them news of the outside, beyond the city’s great walls.
Sometimes the brown-eyed men brought him presents, like the mechanical parrot that walked and squawked or the wind-up lizard that skittered up the sidewalk. They always stood outside with their presents and waited on the sidewalk because his aunt wouldn’t allow them near the house. The house had been his parents’ house, and he overheard the grown-ups saying that if it weren’t for his parents these people wouldn’t be visiting the city at all. Sometimes they said it like a great thing. Other times it sounded like a curse.
When his aunt decided that they’d stood outside long enough, or when she realized that the dark-eyed ones were never going away, she would let him go outside and accept the gift. Each time, the men would say something to him quickly, softly, something kind about his parents whom they clearly had admired very much.
The jaguar priests had taken them, they said, and he would not know for years that they had died horribly. All he knew at five, going on six, was what his mother’s sister told him, that they had gone to the southern highlands to teach these people and something bad had happened so they couldn’t get back.
Verna muttered a chant in that sing-song language as she fastened the screen door and the old-fashioned glass door behind it. Rafferty was dazzled by the thousands of bronze wings that glinted in the after-shower sun.
They pushed up out of gardens and gravel driveways, from grasses and from rocky hillsides. They unfolded their glittering wings and joined the bronze fog rolling across the valley. It was like watching fire disassemble a log. While Verna shrieked into her handset for help, Rafferty knelt at the living room window and listened to the scrabble of hard little bodies against the walls outside.
The things that pressed themselves against the glass had bodies bigger than a man’s biggest finger. Orange with yellow underbellies, they unfolded finely veined wings that stretched a half-meter from tip to tip. Each bug had four wings and six bristly legs.
Rafferty couldn’t think of them one at a time when the walls, the gardens, and streets, the air itself were already filled with them and with the dry rattle of their wings. The window was a-crawl with them. He remembered for years his fascination with the bob and pulse of the thousands of yellow bellies flattened against the glass.
Verna yanked him away from the window and activated the blinds. He noticed the inside of her house for the first time while she muttered in a tight voice and threw things into a bag. The house was nothing like he’d imagined.
One huge room held couches along the walls and a large wooden table near the kitchen. Unlike the outside of the house, the inside was spotless. The walls were not walls, but the same kinds of installations that decorated the sides of the vans: Pictures that could change, jungle pictures, and, somewhere in the room, a box broadcast jungle sounds.
Bright-colored blankets with strange designs covered the walls and lots of blankets draped the couches. Rafferty stood on a red, blue, and black rug woven with animals and big-nosed people with helmets and spears.
When she finally took him out of the house he was rolled inside one of these blankets so that he could neither see nor hear. He felt her noiseless car swerve and lurch and slam hard when it hit holes. It stopped, backed up and turned. He couldn’t count how many times this happened, and, in spite of the wool itching his nose, he got sleepy enough inside the blanket to doze.
Then the car lurched hard his way and tipped, kept tipping, tipped all the way over. When the rolling stopped, Rafferty woke up squashed in place with the blanket over his head. He was pinned so tight his chest and back felt like they met. He could move his left arm and his head.
He worked at the blanket across his face and saw that he was lying on the ceiling of the car. His head was lower than the rest of him and the back seat had popped out to wedge him in. Gurgles and gasps came from the front seat. He called out but the noises only came farther apart and finally stopped. The roof of the car beneath him was littered with shards of broken glass, incense butts, and pink plastic hair curlers.
Rafferty could hardly breathe with the seat jamming him in so tight. He tried to shove it away but it wouldn’t budge. He panted tiny, burning breaths from the effort and a lot of small black spots in front of his eyes melted into one big one. He wasn’t really asleep, he hadn’t caught his breath yet, but he knew he wasn’t getting out of there.
When he realized he couldn’t get out he had to go to the bathroom. He beat on the back of the seat, but that made the spots come back so he started crying, but that hurt, too. Outside, the familiar rasp and tick of those bright bugs played against the metal of the car. By the time Rafferty had wet himself, the inside of the car was crawling with them. They didn’t bite or sting, they just crawled over him with their sticker-like feet.
He was wedged inside the car with them for three nights before he ate the first one. It wouldn’t get out of his face and he could barely bat it away. He caught the bug by the root of its wings with his free hand, shook it once, and popped it into his mouth. His lips were cracked, his tongue and throat swelled dry from thirst.
What happened between Rafferty and the bug was purely some kind of reflex, Uncle explained later. Rafferty kept hold of the wings and spat out the legs because they were long and skinny and they stuck in his throat. He lost count of the nights after that, and thought of the rest of the bugs he ate as corn-dogs. A scattering of wings and legs tilted in the wind under his head, little bronze-petalled flowers with dark brown stalks. He learned not to smell the incredible stench that rolled in from the front seat, and he learned to live with the mice.
Rafferty slept with the scuttle of feet across his face, learned that crying only made his throat worse, learned that sometimes there was no border between waking and dreams.
He woke up crying in one dream because the boy in his dream was crying. Rafferty watched him climb up and down a ladder outside a ratty-looking building with vines choking its sides. In another dream, the boy called his name, and it was so clear that Rafferty woke up with a start and said, “Here. I’m here.” His voice was raspy and sore in his throat from his crying.
He had a lot of dreams, but they were strange and felt like they belonged to somebody else. He always woke up exhausted, with a pounding headache, and he would sleep then without dreaming for a while.
Coming out of a dream of drinking from the well behind the dream boy’s grandparents’ house, Rafferty heard the heavy crunch of footsteps and the clatter of gravel against the side of the car.
“Verna!” a hoarse voice shouted, a male voice. “Verna?”
Someone pulled glass out of one of the windows in front.
“Oh, no,” the voice whispered. Then it coughed a couple of times and gagged.
When the man sat down outside the car and slumped against it, Rafferty listened to everything as though he were perched on a tree limb above the whole broken scene.
Rafferty knew this: If he didn’t speak, the man would leave and he would die there. He knew that without knowing much about death, except for the brittle creatures that he had snatched from the seat-back and stuffed into his mouth. That, and what his senses told him about Verna in the front seat.
He remembered he wanted to say, “Thirsty,” but what his throat managed to hiss out was, “Hungry.” The word sounded like the struggle of dry wings against steel. He repeated it, louder.
“Hungry.”