Page 6 of Road Refugees

Chapter Three

Heaven

Like the next scene in a movie, I came to by the side of a road.

That’s how chloral hydrate works. They give it to you before a surgery to help you relax. That’s why you think “my, that was a fast operation” when really it took an hour. That’s why you’re happily chatting with the assistant who takes you into the operating room, and remember none of it later. At least, that’s how surgery goes in the outside world, the reality beyond the gates of Cornucopia.

Flashes of what Orson had done to me flitted across my brainpan. The knockout drops made me blissfully numb to the anal rape with the metal dildo. He used no lubricant, being only interested in violence—not sex. Well, that’s what rape is. Violence. It really has nothing to do with sex.

Shivering a little, I remembered to care where I was. It was too dark to see much, so I figured it was before the sun rose the next morning. I sat like a regular person upright on a bench, but I was dressed oddly. Fingering my chest, I discovered I was wearing that damned nurse’s uniform again. The lapels were stiff beneath my fingers. Oh, good God in an evil world. This wasn’t a normal experience, but it had become so to me. At least I had my good, sturdy shoes on, and “I” had tossed on some kind of a sweat jacket. I clutched my giant purse that a sister-wife had once called a “go bag.”

A piteous whine pierced the still air. Chip.

His eyes glowed like a fox’s. “Chip!” He jumped up on the bench with me. I threw my arms around him and gratefully peppered his face with kisses. What a little dollface! “Chip! How did you follow me? Where are we? What is this thing—”

Oh, shut the front door. The metal dildo was still up my butt.

And sitting on it had only shoved it up there farther.

I had to stand, a dizzying prospect, and stumble behind the bench. I didn’t want to offend Chip, but I had to get rid of that thing. Suffice to say, I tossed it far into the desert, and Chip did not follow. I found tissue in my purse to clean myself.

Really, I was beyond crying at that point. I used to cry in my first years in Cornucopia. I felt sorry for myself, entreated God to explain to me why Orson singled me out. At some point I’d just given up, exhausted with the caring of it all. Instead, I tried to figure out what sort of bench I was on. Was I outside Cornucopia’s gates? Yes, a sign on a pole indicated a Kane County bus stop.

“I’m outside the gates.” I sat on the bench and rubbed my face against Chip’s.

Things started coming back to me. Save Our Baby Brides, that was the name of the organization in Avalanche started by the woman who had fled Orson Ream, protecting her teenaged daughter. Could they save me too? But I wasn’t really a baby bride. Twenty-eight, I had been sealed to Orson when I was eighteen, when my mainstream parents had forced me to cleanse my illicit baby. I had just wanted to be a lawyer! But they wouldn’t send me to college. Extremely by the book, old-timey Mormons, they were. They were not Brighamites like Orson, believers in polygamy, but they were rigid. My only choice was to perhaps marry a man who was open-minded, who would put me through school.

I never met a man such as that. So I got Orson Ream.

A car sailed by. Then another. I started wondering what I would do. Save Our Baby Brides seemed like the best, first choice. I’d been to Avalanche a couple of times since arriving in Cornucopia. Dying at the time with storefronts boarded up, apparently it’d had a resurgence since the women’s arrival, with some outsider men helping them. I’d been acquainted with a couple of women before they had made their escape. I could find them. They could help me find my brother Arkie, allegedly run off to join a motorcycle gang in Arizona.

“I’ll go to Avalanche,” I told Chip.

When he smiled his approval, I realized the sun was coming up. Distant buttes first glowed purple, then a rust red, ringing the desert’s bowl. I remembered to look in my wallet. A five-dollar bill. Would that get me to Avalanche?

Do they allow dogs on the bus?

Rooting around in my purse, under a ragged photo of Arkie I found a couple of stale chocolate chip cookies. Strangely enough, Cornucopia allowed chocolate, Coke, and booze, and they always turned a blind eye to cigarettes and marijuana. I gave Chip one of the cookies, and I tried biting a corner of the other, but it was way too hard. Chip got that one, too. I saw the beauty in his every detail as he munched, knowing why dogs were better than people.

“I’m on the road to nowhere,” I told him. “Well, I’m on the road to find out.”

I sat with that idea for awhile, and it did begin to cheer up a part of me. Maybe it was the oxytocin I’d heard flooded your brain when you petted dogs. My heart thudded when the county bus approached, and I stood and waved, unsure how to flag down a bus.

I stepped up, holding out my five-dollar bill. “Can my dog come on?”

“No dogs,” said the lady, no emotion to her voice.

I tried again. “Do you go to Avalanche?”

“You’d have to go through Zion National Park and catch the St. George bus.”

“Is five dollars enough?”

She calculated, maybe taking in my odd costume. Everyone in the county must have known about the fringe polyg commune of Cornucopia. I was hoping she’d feel sorry for me, assume my situation.

But no. “That’s be easy twenty, twenty-five dollars. You’ll need to transfer at the Zion ranger station.”

So, all hope lost, I had to resume sitting on the bench with Chip. It was not long before a sister-wife on her way to deliver our woven rugs to outsiders pulled over.