Page 26 of Trade
“Uh. It’s the place where they grind the grain.” The way he answers, I can tell he’s being very careful not to let on that he thinks it’s a dumb question.
“You have farms?” Did they reestablish agriculture, or did it never fully disappear?
“Not me.”
“But other people do?”
“Yeah. If they can get the buy-in.”
The only buy-in I know is the twenty credits guys have to put toward the house bank to get into one of the poker clubs, but I get the idea. “What is the buy-in?”
He shrugs. “Fuel. Big working equipment like a tractor or a digger or something like that. Guns.” For the first time, the hollows of his cheeks flush. In embarrassment?
“How much fuel?”
His cheeks darken even more. “A truckload.”
“Like what you traded for me?”
He stops looking at me and glares at the stream.
“You could have bought into a farm?” I prod.
He grunts.
“And there are women at the farms?”
His jaw tics, and he doesn’t answer.
“So why trade for me and end up with nothing?”
“I didn’t end up with nothing, did I?” He glances back over, and his eyes are on fire. “And I didn’t want to share.”
My belly stirs in a way it hasn’t in years, and I don’t know where to put the feeling—what slot in my conception of the world it belongs in—so I fall back on my new habit and instigate trouble.
“So do I get to keep the tablets?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Even though you didn’t finish?”
“We finished,” he says quietly after a long moment. “You were done.” And then he stands, brushes his palms on his pants, and offers me a hand.
I take it.
We continue walking. He shortens his stride so he stays beside me, and it’s a little harder going without him stomping the grass flat for me with his big boots, but I don’t mind.
We’re entering a more densely wooded area when he asks, like he’d just been musing, “What are you going to do with what you get from the fuel?”
I stop in my tracks. If this were a cartoon from the Before, I’d plunge my ears with my fingers. “What?”
“Do you get scrip for it or what?” Scrip is like credit. Dalton thinksIget the fuel, that I’ll get credit for it. My understanding morphs into a new shape again like clay thrown on a marble slab.
He thinks I sold myself, that this wasmytrade, not my solemn duty, the highest act of dedication, a sacrifice that will ensure humanity lives on despite the end of the world.
“I don’t get the fuel,” I mumble, distracted by the white-hot rage pumping through my veins. I won’t get anything except a pass on future lotteries and minor infractions.
“Not any of it?” He’s incredulous.
