“That’s a shame,” I said, because it was.
“Everything ends,” she said. “That’s just God’s way.”
I didn’t believe much in God, but she wasn’t wrong.
“People are staring,” I said. We were stopped at a light—probably the only light in town—and an old white man was glaring from behind the curtains of some kind of knickknack store.
“Oh, they’re not staring at you,” Gertrude said. The light turned green, and she turned left off the main drag. The town was only about three, maybe four blocks wide. Maybe ten blocks long. Lots of small houses with forest and plains just beyond. “People here ain’t prejudiced, got nothing against black folks or even folks who dress like, I don’t know what you call that . . .”
“Punks?” I asked. We weren’t what most people think of when you think of punks. None of us had Mohawks, and I don’t think a one of us besides maybe Thursday or Brynn listened to the Sex Pistols. But we were punks.
“Sure, yeah.”
“What about trans people?” Vulture asked.
Gertrude looked up into the rearview, probably looking at Vulture to see if she could tell he was trans.
“Oh, honey, this is Montana, not North Dakota,” she said.
“Does that mean yes or no?” Vulture asked.
“We read the news, we’ve seen people like you online, and people around here are willing to let people be people.”
“That’s cool,” Vulture said. He didn’t sound incredibly reassured.
“You know,” Gertrude said, “I never would have noticed. You pass really well.”
“So that’s the kind of thing that probably sounds like it’s going to be a compliment but turns out not to be,” Vulture said.
“Have you had, you know . . .”
I think three of us tried to cut her off at once.
“Not a real polite topic of conversation,” I said.
“Got it.”
She genuinely seemed to take it well, but telling her not to ask the questions she so clearly wanted to ask still managed to kind of silence the car for a moment.
“So why are people staring?” I asked at last, as we stopped at a stop sign.
“Folks have been staring at me ever since I came back.”
“Back to town?”
“Back from the dead.” She said it so casually, like it was something no one would raise an eyebrow at.
“About that,” I asked. “You mean, like, they had to put those paddles on you and shock you back to life after a car accident or something? If that’s not, I don’t know, also the kind of question that’s rude to ask?”
“No, no, it’s okay.” Gertrude turned right, onto an unlit street. Maybe the library was this way. Maybe something worse was happening.
For the first time in the whole interaction—hey, I may be slow, but I’d had a rough day—I was getting uneasy. Sitting on the edge of my seat, eying the locks on the doors.
“I died of cancer. Last Christmas Eve. I was dead six months.”
“God bring you back?” I’d dealt with crazy folks all my life. It was fine. We’d be fine. I turned over my shoulder, to see if my friends were paying attention. They were. Brynn had her hand on her knife. Thursday had his hand in the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie, probably on his gun.
“Someone like that,” Gertrude said.
I had a feeling it wasn’t God who’d told Gertrude to pick us up after all. We’d asked for the dead to guard us.
She stopped the car.
It wasn’t sudden—she’d been slowing down—but it caught me off-guard and I reflexively flicked off my seat belt, ready to fight or run.
“Well,” she said, turning to smile with her cold smile. “We’re here. Been a pleasure meeting you ‘punks,’ and God bless!”
* * *
The library was in the old post office building on a darkened side street. Greek-style columns supported the front of the stone building, and a single flickering bulb in a sconce illuminated the door. A hand-lettered wooden sign read:
PENDLETON LIBRARY. STILL FREE. STILL OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. 10 A.M.–4 P.M. RUN BY ANARCHISTS.
Beneath it, someone had tacked a piece of paper that read:
WE DO NOT CARRY THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK. GET YOUR BAD POLITICS AND BAD SCIENCE RECIPES OFF THE INTERNET, NOT FROM US.
Yeah, okay. We could find friends here.
“What’s our cover story?” I asked.
Thursday shrugged. “Play it by ear. Back up whatever someone else comes up with.”
Thursday knocked. He broke up the rhythm of his knock, presumably to sound friendly and less like we might be cops. No one likes a cop-knocker.
It started raining, out of the blue. There’d been a few drops on the windshield in the last hour, but nothing serious. As soon as we stood under the awning of the library, the sky opened up.
“We’re closed,” a voice said, sleepily, from the other side of the door.
“We’re travelers, heard there were good people here.”
The door opened a slit. The white man peering through the crack looked to be a bit older than us, maybe in his midthirties. Gray streaked his thick black beard, and one half of his mustache was stark white. A spade was tattooed in faded blue on his cheek. “Who told you that?”
“Gertrude Miller,” I said. “She picked us up hitchhiking.”
There was fear in his face. His eyes darted to each of us in turn.
Another face appeared behind his. A woman closer to my age, with pitch black hair cut into baby bangs that continued into an undercut on the side of her head. Feral bangs, I’d sometimes heard the style called. They went well with her septum clicker and immaculate makeup. Sometimes I’m jealous of people who pull off high femme so well.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Vasilis,” she said, “let them in.”
“Sorry,” the man, presumably Vasilis, mumbled. He opened the door and we went inside.
I’m used to anarchist spaces being a little bit . . . humble might be the polite word for it. Scrappy. DIY. But this place still looked like a library. A small one, sure, but also one inside a beautiful old post office building. Rows and rows of books on thick wooden
