The Son of Every Man

Chapter 6.6

The kid shrugged. "No idea."

"It used to be the first camp," said Eddie. "A long time ago."

;-;

The one good thing about their visits to the other camps was that they were brief, at least relative to the overnight stay at Headwaters. And the camps themselves were, at least, redeemed by those fantastic names: Nestor, Sinbad, Luna, Maltese—the kid was right. There was something to them.

All of them were smaller than Headwaters, and only one, Luna, had as many permanent workers. The other camps had two: one for crude work and driving, another to keep the books and carry out tasks that required special skills or dexterity. Despite his best attempts at blocking them out, the workers remained an uncomfortable fixation for Miguel. He tried to focus solely on their methods for harvesting, storing, drying, grinding (or crushing, depending on what class the camp produced), soaking and extraction, dehydrating, cutting, packing...but he had begun to notice a particular quality uniting the forgotten people of the desert. It started as nothing more than an obscure, familiar quirk in the demeanor of one. But then Miguel noticed it again in a second. By then it had gripped him and refused to let go.

The kid hung back to relieve himself in the brush as they walked to the edge of Echo, the third camp on their itinerary. Miguel took the opportunity alone with his boss to bring it up. "They're users, aren't they?"

"Some of them. Not all," said Eddie, kicking a stone across the dirt. "I think Headwaters is clean. But, then again, Muskogee had that look in his eye, didn't he?"

"That's so fucked up."

Miguel could scarcely name a single occasion on which Eddie had ever become impatient with him. But the way his boss grabbed his shoulder at that moment, coercing him into a tight, two-man huddle, indicated he was not fucking around. "Listen," he said. "Life can be rough out here. I don't know what notions of all of this you had in your mind before you saw it, but now that you have, I suggest you make an effort to recalibrate."

Miguel was released. He walked immediately away from Eddie, toward the car, feeling like a child who had just been scolded. But he did as instructed. He began to recalibrate.

Back on the highway, Miguel flipped through Gabe's CD case, calling out names, waiting for one to catch. By the end, neither Eddie nor Gabe had made a sound—surprise, fucking surprise. He sighed. "I'm choosing one if you guys don't speak up."

"I could listen to Dre," said Eddie. "Which one is it?"

"The Chronic." Miguel handed the disc up to Eddie and he put it in the player. The album was a little before Miguel's time, but he would welcome with open arms any proof that Eddie wasn't a music-hating robot. He sensed an opening. "What else do you like to listen to?"

"Stuff like this, up to around '95. The Clan...and Biggie, rest in peace."

"Tupac?"

"Of course."

"Why stop in '95?"

"Because I had a little girl. Music like this doesn't mix with kids. It's all gone to shit since then, anyway."

"Has it?"

Eddie chuckled quietly to himself. "Most definitely."

"So what else, then?"

Eddie paused. "Well, this might seem strange, but I have a thing for old American music. Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, shit like that."

"How did you get into that?"

"When I first came here, I was put into immersion program for refugee kids. They handed out tapes full of all these old songs. I didn't have a lot of possessions at the time, so you can imagine I held onto mine pretty tight. Well, there was a version of Stephen Foster's 'Old Folks at Home' on there by the Robert Shaw Chorale. I didn't even know what the hell they were saying, but man, it was a beautiful recording. I'd go to the library and check out a Walkman and listen to that tape over and over while I studied English. Later on, I bought my own player, and I would put it on to fall asleep at night."

The kid's interest had been piqued. "Do you still have the tape?"

"I'm not sure. I never got rid of it, so it's probably somewhere in storage. I haven't listened to it in years."

The CD played on as the car pressed through the heat of the desert.

"Are we stopping at Maltese, too?" Miguel asked. He realized they had probably already passed it by. In fact, before too long, they would be entering the familiar orbit of the Delta Encampment.

"We're not staying at a camp tonight," said Eddie. "Well, not an official one, anyway."

"What does that mean?"

"You saw the tent in the trunk, didn't you?"

Miguel already knew where this was going. "Yeah."

"Hell, I even stuck sleeping pads in there for you guys. I thought it would be nice to do our own thing tonight."

He though it would be nice—Eddie. Eddie thought something would be "nice." Who the fuck was this man, and what had happened to their boss? "Fine with me," said Miguel. "I don't remember the last time I camped for real."

"I've never camped," said Gabe. "The closest I got was last night in the barracks."

"Never?" asked Miguel.

The kid's eyes met his own through the rearview mirror. They looked back at the road. "My mother didn't like stuff like that. I'm not sure how my father felt about it."

The car fell silent. It was the first time on the trip that anyone had brought up Marco. Miguel thought that was strange. Strictly speaking, they all reserved the right to summon his memory aloud. Each of their relationships with him had been meaningful. Maybe it was that the three of them had never breathed the same air until now—except for Gabe's first days of training at the warehouse, which hardly counted. Maybe this whole time, Eddie and Miguel had been deferring to the kid, waiting for him to be the one. Perhaps Gabe was the only one within the bounds of this bizarre weekend journey who would ever have dared invoke his name. Old Big Boss, the man, the legend, the Father. Whatever the case, the kid had just done it. Miguel felt the special weight the moment carried, and he had a hunch—to borrow a phrase—that the Eddie and Gabe did, too.

Gabe's voice cut back in: "Anyway, I'm excited to try."

"You'll love it," Eddie assured him. "I know a great place where no one ever goes."

;-;