Chapter 23
The credits rolled on the small screen, white text crawling up against black while the orchestral score faded. I reached for the remote and clicked off the TV, still processing what I'd just watched.
I turned and the words died in my mouth.
Scout sat on the other end of the trailer's small couch, tears streaming down her cheeks. She wasn't sobbing, she wasn't making any sound at all. Just silent tears, her blue eyes fixed on the now-dark screen.
"Scout? What's wrong?"
She blinked and seemed to notice me for the first time. Her hand came up quickly, wiping at her face with the back of her wrist.
"Nothing. It's nothing." She stood abruptly, grabbing the popcorn bowl from the fold-down table between us. "The movie was just different from the book, that's all."
She moved to the small garbage can by the trailer's kitchenette and tipped the unpopped kernels and half-eaten pieces into it, her back to me. Her voice steadied as she talked, the way people do when they're trying to outrun an emotion.
"In the book, the monster is intelligent. Articulate. He teaches himself to read by watching a family through a crack in their wall. He reads Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and the Sorrows of Werther. He's not a grunting brute. He's a philosopher cursed with a hideous form."
"I didn't know that."
"Mary Shelley wrote it when she was nineteen. Nineteen years old and she created one of the most enduring stories in Western literature." She set the bowl in the small sink. "You should read it."
"You say that after every movie we watch. 'Read the book, Thomas. The book is better, Thomas.'"
"Because the book is always better."
"That's it, next time we're watching something that isn't based on a classic novel," I teased, trying to make her smile. "Maybe a western. Or even a movie with color. Imagine that!"
"Let's not be hasty."
Scout turned from the sink, and I could see she'd composed herself. The tear tracks were still visible, but her expression had settled into something more familiar. She glanced toward the trailer's small window.
"The days are lengthening. But it's starting to get dark. I should be leaving now." She hesitated at the door, her hand on the latch. "Would you walk with me?"
"Of course." I raised an eyebrow. "I'm not sure what protection I'd offer. You're the one with the Smith and Wesson on your hip."
"I don't want protection. I want to show you something."
I grabbed my jacket from the hook by the door.
"Lead the way."
We stepped out into the cooling evening air. The sky had turned that shade of deep blue that comes just before true darkness, and the first stars were showing themselves above the treeline.
Scout didn't head down the path toward her father's property. Instead, she turned north, toward the slope that climbed into the thickest part of the woods.
I followed her onto a trail I hadn't known existed.
It was narrow, barely visible in the fading light, threading between Douglas firs that had been growing since before either of us was born.
Scout moved through the forest as if she were part of it, her feet finding solid ground without apparent effort while I stumbled over roots and pushed through ferns that slapped against my jeans.
"The movie wasn't scary," she said after we'd walked in silence for several minutes. "That's not why I was crying."
"Then why?"
"It was tragic." She ducked under a low branch without breaking stride.
"The monster suffered. He didn't mean to hurt anyone.
He didn't understand what he was doing when he threw the little girl in the water.
He thought she would float like the flowers.
And for that innocent mistake, he was hunted down and burned alive by a savage mob. "
I thought about the scene. The torches, the windmill. The creature's final screams.
"That's true," I said. "It is tragic when you think about it that way."
"The villagers never tried to understand him.
They saw something different, something that frightened them, and they decided it had to be destroyed.
" She paused ahead of me, then continued moving.
"He never had a fair chance. From the moment of his creation, his fate was sealed.
Not because of anything he did, but because of what he was. "
"Why did that affect you so much?"
The trail steepened. I could hear Scout's breathing change as she climbed, though her pace never slowed.
"It reminded me of my father."
I wasn't sure what to say to that, so I said nothing. Just kept climbing, kept following the sound of her movement through the darkening forest.
"He served for twenty-two years," Scout continued.
"Did you know that? Twenty-two years in the Army.
He went where they told him to go. Iraq, twice.
Kuwait. Afghanistan for a short deployment early on.
He built power stations in places where people were trying to kill him.
He breathed smoke from burn pits that the military swore were perfectly safe. "
A branch snapped under my foot, loud in the quiet woods.
"He believed in what he was doing. For a long time, he believed.
He thought he was serving something noble, protecting something worth protecting.
But the longer he served, the more he saw.
Contractors getting rich while soldiers died.
Officers lying about conditions to protect their careers.
Big corporations profiting from wars that never seemed to end. "
"I suppose that would discourage anyone."
"It broke something in him. Not his spirit, not his will. But his faith. His faith in institutions, in governments, in the idea that the people in charge were trying to do the right thing."
The trail leveled out briefly before climbing again. I was breathing hard now, my desk-job lungs protesting the exertion. Scout seemed unaffected.
"And then he got sick. The burn pits... they'd been burning everything over there.
Batteries, medical waste, plastic, metal, and even human waste.
And the soldiers breathed it in every day.
When my father started having trouble breathing and started coughing up blood, he filed a claim. Do you know what they did?"
"They denied it?"
"They denied it." Her voice was flat and hard. "They said there was insufficient evidence linking my father's condition to his service. Twenty-two years. Two combat deployments. Exposed to toxic smoke every single day. And they said they couldn't prove it was connected."
"That's goddamn terrible. What did he do?"
"He appealed. They denied the appeal. He appealed again. Denied again. Eventually, he gave up. They gave him a small pension, the bare minimum they were legally required to provide, and told him he was no longer their problem."
The trees thinned slightly, and I could see Scout more clearly now. She'd stopped on the trail ahead and turned to face me.
"That's what made him a willing outcast. Not bitterness, though he has that too.
Understanding. He understood that he could not trust the institutions that had used him and discarded him.
He understood that the only way to be truly free was to step outside the system entirely.
To build a life that didn't depend on anyone's goodwill or honesty or competence but his own. "
"Like Frankenstein's monster," I said quietly.
"Exactly like that. Driven out of society simply for being what he was. A man who saw too clearly. A man who refused to pretend."
She started walking again, and I followed.
"I know you consider us abnormal," she said. "My father and I. The way we live. The things we believe."
"Scout, I don't think that."
"It's alright. You don't have to deny it. I know we're different. I know the way we live seems strange to people who grew up in houses with reliable electricity, running water, television and internet. I know my vocabulary is peculiar and my social skills are lacking."
"I've never thought--"
"Thomas." She stopped again, and this time when she turned, her eyes caught the last light of the day. "It's alright. Truly. I'm not wounded by it. I'm simply acknowledging what is."
I didn't know what to say, so I waited.
"I love the way I was raised," she continued.
"I love this land. I love the freedom of it, the self-reliance, the connection to something real and lasting.
I love knowing how to grow food, how to hunt game, how to build shelter and purify water.
I love that my education came from books and experience rather than classrooms and tests. "
"And your father?"
Her expression softened. "I love my father more than I can express. He gave me everything. Not things, not possessions, but knowledge. Skills. A way of seeing the world that cuts through all the noise and distraction and gets to what matters."
She turned and started walking again, faster now.
"And I think you might be the same as us, Thomas.
Not yet, not completely, but the seed is there.
I think you came here looking for something, even if you didn't know what it was.
I think you're tired of the life you were living, tired of the compromises and the pretenses and the slow suffocation of working for someone else's profit. "
"Maybe so," I admitted.
"That's why I wanted to show you this place. My place. Somewhere I've never shown anyone else."
The trail ended abruptly at a massive deadfall, a Douglas fir that must have been two hundred feet tall before whatever storm or rot or age brought it down. The trunk was enormous, covered in moss and ferns, clearly fallen for decades based on the vegetation growing from its bark.
Scout climbed over a lower section where the trunk had split, and I followed clumsily. On the other side, the forest opened up without warning.