by Leif Enger
Waltzer shook his head in wonder. “How do you even live, boy?”
“It’s usually better,” I said. In fact, all this attention to my respiratory apparatus had made it self-conscious; it was shutting down valves all over the place. I said, “May I please be excused, Mr. Waltzer?”
He said, in evident disbelief, “Are you strangling on me now, Reuben? Has the monster got you by the throat?”
I’ll say this: I kept quiet at first. But these attacks have an exponential nature, doubling and quadrupling their hold; they push every advantage and are fearsome enough without some skeptic calling you a fake.
“Rube,” Davy said, seeing my look, “you better lie down—”
“Here, Reuben, this is nonsense,” Waltzer said, about to try to help me again. “Stop embarrassing yourself. Now when I count three—”
“Shut up!” I gasped. “Shut up and let me be!” It was all the air I had. I paid for some more and added, “Mr. Waltzer.” I can’t forget how the air in the cabin turned all spotty then, nor the scramble I heard, nor the broken-bat sound which was my head striking the floor, though I didn’t feel that until quite a bit later.
Of all the dreams you ever had, which do you least hope to have again? For me it was the man with the skin bag—the little devilish fellow who slugged my gut, harvested my breath and bore it away on his shoulder. The moment of highest peril in that dream came when he crouched down peering at my face. His eyes were windows through which I glimpsed an awful country. I don’t like telling about it. The point here is that for a long while I walked in a gray place where I felt again that little man’s presence. Across a landscape of killed grass and random boulders I moved, looking for something I needed. In the dream I didn’t even know it was my breath. I thought of it as a thing packed tight in a seamed bag. I knew who had it and knew I hadn’t the strength to take it from him, yet there I was in his country. A sunless place—the cold from the ground came up through my shoes. The boulders lay everywhere and cast no shadows, and they were the same color as the dead grass and as the sky. I smelled decay on the wind. Had Swede contrived to be along she could’ve described it better. I’ll say I had the sense of walking through an old battlefield upon which the wrong side had prevailed. It was the little man’s country. I felt him approaching and lay down with my back against a boulder and shut my eyes to wait. He soon found me. It was colder every second and the smell of decay strengthened and mixed with sulfur as I heard his nimble steps. Even shuteyed I knew what he would do. Now he’d crouch—and I heard the creak of his boots as he did so. Now he’d lean down and look in my eyes—my lashes felt his breath.
“Reuben,” he whispered. “Look at me.”
What choice did I have? I opened my eyes.
Jape Waltzer’s face searched mine as I hope never to be searched again.
I couldn’t say a thing. I was confused—wondering about the skin bag. It seemed to me Waltzer must have it and that he wanted something more besides. I wilted back from him but he leaned ever forward. I saw we were outside the cabin and that I lay against it in my coat and that Waltzer was crouched in the snow against a night of misty stars.
“Ah, you’re breathing now,” he said. He smiled to reassure me, but in his eyes I saw the same dead country through which I’d just come. “Davy’s getting Fry. He’ll take you back—if you can ride.”
I nodded, dreading to speak aloud lest Waltzer change his mind.
He pressed closer to me. “You know not to tell of this place,” he said.
I said, “Yes, Mr. Waltzer.”
Then Fry cantered up out of the night. His hooves made lit whitecaps of snow and he laid back his head as though angry at bridle and bit, for Davy had interrupted his sleep.
“Come back and see us, Reuben. I’ll teach you how to breathe,” Waltzer said quietly.
Davy lifted a leg over Fry’s withers and slipped off frontwise. He gathered me up and carried me to the horse and heaved me aboard, then rocked himself up behind. I honestly had no breath. Fearing another faint I leaned back into my brother as though his were the mighty Everlasting Arms sung about, and he reached around to mind the reins and keep me upright. Fry arched his neck and chewed his bit at carrying us, but Davy ignored all complaints and we trotted up out of Waltzer’s valley. Minutes gone from there, Davy asked was I feeling better. I was. In fact across parts of that homeward trip I actually slept, but it was the good kind—free of bouldered grayscapes, I mean, and robbers who had you on their ground.
Winning Her Hand
AT MY AGE TEDDY ROOSEVELT’S LUNGS WOULD LOCK DOWN SO TIGHT HIS father would gallop his fastest horse down gaslit New York boulevards with the boy astraddle before him. Mr. Roosevelt was called Greatheart, and his idea was to impel air down Teddy’s throat by their very speed. This fusion of hoofbeats, daring, and midnight mercy romanced Swede, but to me it spoke less of romance than of desperation. I thought of panicked Roosevelts as Teddy strove for wind. I imagined a cycle wherein his lovely mother, at the first tightness of breath, propped the boy upright and stroked his cheek and told him gentle stories of exotic pet animals, llamas and guinea fowl and allegiant shaggy knee-high ponies, or of the glorious lavender moths her brother Captain James had collected in South America, moths with phosphor wings a foot across before which natives knelt in worship. It was Mrs. Roosevelt’s belief such tales could turn her son’s mind to pleasing things and relax his crimping passages. At times it worked, at others not. Then Great-heart, the bearded patriarch, would rise from bed and stride to the stables to saddle his fleet charger—return for his son, now bundled in wool and furs—and dash away in the night with Teddy gaping at the wind.
Did this method work for me? Maybe so. I do recall getting my breath as Fry plunged on with what seemed overconfident speed. Maybe the wind was forcing itself down in—or maybe I was just relieved to be away from Waltzer. But when we rose over the last hill and trotted down toward Roxanna’s, I felt sufficiently safe from horrors to ask Davy when I could see him next. He wouldn’t say. He let me off Fry a few hundred yards back of the barn. The slopes to the west were just showing blue to where you thought of calm seas; in less than two hours they’d be plain snowy hills, and I’d have to get up and candle eggs.
As it turned out, though, Swede did the candling.
I woke with a jump and a rotten fever, with Roxanna’s cool hand against my forehead. You know how a room smells with fever? I squinted while she pulled the shades.
“It’s still awfully bright,” I told her. The light felt like two dirty thumbs in my eyes.
She opened a wardrobe, took down a quilt, stepped up on a chair and tacked it over the window.
“Better, darling?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Could you drink a little cocoa?”
I shook my head.
“Reuben?”
“No, thank you.” No doubt I sounded like some boy choking.
She came and bent over me, put her hand on my forehead again. She listened to my breathing. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“I’ll get a cool cloth,” she whispered. “We’ll whip that fever.”
I nodded. To my great relief she went from the room and I wiped my eyes and settled down. The easy way she’d asked that—Better, darling?—I don’t know why, but I could hardly answer her.
Sleep that day was a warm pool into which I dove and stayed, sporadically lifting my head to sense the world. Roxanna entered with a bowl of beef broth and later with buttered saltines. Swede stood by the bed a few times, waiting for me to open my eyes, which I didn’t. Once I surfaced to the rattle of papers and found her on a chair next the bed, pretending to rub out some words on a page. Her regret at my awakening was also counterfeit. She happened to be waist-deep in a new Sundown episode.
Barely conscious, I listened like some drunken editor. You’ll recall how Sunny started as ramrod lawman, then found himself compelled to questionable action and had lately grown into the best of misunderstood outlaws. This
new chapter placed him in an undiscovered valley high in the mountains, a snakeless Eden and matchless hideout. Its meadows were the rippled green of the resting sea, fed by springs and by a vigorous brook twisting down to a pool with a floor of polished stones. Moreover, this valley had but one entrance, a steep slot through canyon walls which one tucked stick of dynamite could obliterate forever. Yes, Sunny owned a stick. In fact he had tucked it already, back in a crevice away from rain. Should trouble threaten he could merely strike a match and seal himself in Paradise forever.
I’ll admit that even in my groggy state this seemed a lot like Lassiter’s condition in Riders of the Purple Sage. Swede didn’t mind the observation. She said other writers had told this story also and that not even Zane Grey was the first. She said it was such a true story it needed recurrent tellings so as not to fall out of circulation completely. She asked whether it would be wrong for someone to write a story about pirate gold buried under an X, since Mr. Stevenson had done it already. Of course not. Well, secret valleys with sealable entrances were just the same, Swede said: places and things that were so real in the world they were often disbelieved. Sunny anyhow was holed up in this pretty gorge with the dynamite placed. He hadn’t set it off because first he wanted his wife up there with him. I was a little bewildered about the wife business, given Sunny’s undefined connections to various past ladies, but boy, I was tired; I didn’t bring it up. In fact at roughly this point I drifted off again. When finally I woke of my own doing the blanket over the west-facing window was shot with orange pinpricks. The day was over, the fever whipped, and no one had come to steal my breath. I washed up and went downstairs, sticking out my chest like Horatius.
How quickly I’d come to expect Roxanna to make a big deal of me! And how kind she was not to disappoint—at my appearance she smiled, pressed her palm against my forehead, a sensation I enjoyed, remarked on my sturdy constitution to recover so fast, and introduced me to a bowl of vegetable soup. Swede ate too, while Roxanna worked in the kitchen beside us, thumping up crust for a pie. Things were close to perfect.
“When’s Dad coming home?” I asked.
“This evening,” Roxanna said, checking the clock. “He called earlier. He’s sure anxious to see you both.”
“How’d it go with Mr. Andreeson?”
“He didn’t say much. I guess there’s no big news.” She rolled out that crust in about six strokes and laid it across a metal pan.
“So they didn’t find Davy.”
“Not as of this morning.”
“Well, where do you suppose he is?” It was a little mean, my persisting this way; I only asked because I knew the answer and felt smug knowing it. Maybe it was my small-hearted revenge against Dad, my way of suggesting he hadn’t been led to go off with Putrid after all. Then Roxanna turned to me with an encouraging smile, and I saw that she was scared for Davy—scared for him though she’d never met him—and instead of smug I only felt underhanded.
“We have to be steadfast,” she said now. “We have to have faith, you two, that’s all.”
You see? She’d begun to use Dad’s language. You notice something like that, and watching her I noticed too that she was wearing earrings, little gold hoops, and that while in no way impatient she seemed eager to get the pie in the oven and her hands washed and the countertop clean where she’d rolled out the crust.
Swede had been eating in unusual quiet. Out of nowhere she said, “If Dad says we have to go back home, I’m not gonna let him.”
“Neither am I,” Roxanna replied. I looked at her quick, but she was scrubbing the counter, all business and not about to meet my eye.
We didn’t even see who dropped him off. It could’ve been Andreeson or some underling. Who cared? What we saw was Dad standing in his overcoat between the two gas pumps. At his feet was the small cardboard suitcase he called his overnight grip, and he was whisking his hands together gazing up at the house. Roxanna was upstairs so it was only Swede and me at the living-room window—of course we were bouncing and waving like a pair of gibbons—but Dad somehow didn’t see us. He stood there between the pumps looking up at the front gable. He was changed from before. We saw it straight off and quit our bouncing. His expression was curiously buoyant and alien to us. He peered up at that gable like the most hopeful yet constrained boy you ever saw—a boy on his birthday morning, scared to get out of bed for fear everybody forgot.
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked Swede. “Why isn’t he coming in?”
“Ssshhh.” She grabbed my shoulder but kept her eyes on Dad. I couldn’t believe it—now she had the buoyant expression! She’d caught it somehow.
“Good grief,” I muttered. Swede was squeezing my shoulder, transfixed by Dad, who was smoothing his hair back with his left hand. Now he looked critically at his shoes. Straightened the lapels of his overcoat. It was maddening. I started for the door but Swede had my shirt in her hard little fist. At last Dad resolved to come in. Forgetting his grip by the pumps he came up and knocked at the door, just as though he’d never seen the place before.
“Come on,” I told Swede, but still she held me back.
“Let Roxanna,” she said.
“But it’s Dad.”
“Let Roxanna!”—hissing it at me, for now we heard Roxanna descending stairs in a tremendous rustle, shoes skidding across linoleum, then slowing into sight. And I understood. I stopped flatfoot. Roxanna was in a deep blue dress, her hair softly curled in front. Though Swede and I were certain of being her favorite people in all creation, we had the sense of being elsewhere as she glided past. I smelled perfume—that was a first, perfume in somebody’s house. I’d only ever smelled it in church. Roxanna went on to the door and we shamelessly flowed along in her wake, staying back just far enough to remain unseen. Though I suspect we could’ve been two gibbering savants and yet accomplished that. When Dad stepped inside, still wearing that weightless expression, Roxanna reached and took his hand. I didn’t hear what she said but can see their hands touching—not a passionate clasp but an easy timeless transaction as old as Scripture. Then Dad’s hand let go and for just a moment encircled Roxanna’s waist—he was laughing—and when he turned to us he’d never appeared stronger or more like himself or more capable of stepping up to what might be required.
That very night Dad packed up his clothes and moved out to the Air-stream. I didn’t fret, for it was plain now that something was forged between them and no abrupt partings were likely, but it confused me. Following his lead I started stacking shirts in my own suitcase, but Swede came in and crouched beside me.
“We’re not moving out there—only Dad,” she said.
“How come he is?”
“It’s for honor,” she said.
It’s a declaration you like to hear about your own father, and I was pleased by the confident way she made it. “Oh—good.”
“He’s still going to come in the house in the daytime, but he’s going to sleep out there.”
There seemed to be something going unsaid here, though I didn’t know how to reach whatever it was. I’d already asked the only question—How come?—and had my answer.
Swede said, “He told me he wants to make sure the heater’s working in the trailer—remember that night it got so cold?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But it’s really just for honor.” She was pretty proud to have figured this out. I was proud of her, too—I would’ve believed the heater story for sure. It raised a question, though.
“Don’t you think we should move out with him, then?”
Swede hadn’t thought of that, I could tell.
“I don’t think it matters,” she said.
“It matters for Dad,” I pointed out.
“Well, he’s the one who loves Roxanna.”
Surprisingly, I was unembarrassed by such talk. “Well, so do I love Roxanna. So do you, Swede.”
She gave me an oh-Reuben look. “Well, talk to Dad about it then, if you’re so determined.”
“I just liked it better when Mr. Andreeson was the enemy,” I complained finally.
We were in the barn, jacking up the Airstream to lie level so Dad needn’t sleep at a tilt. He was kneeling at the ratchet, squinting the length of the trailer.
“I don’t see what’s changed,” I said.
Dad got up and leaned into the trailer, checking the bubble on a wood level he’d set inside.
“You even told him we were enemies, right to his face. Remember that?” I asked reproachfully—beyond my depth and knowing it, yet unable to shut up.
