The Park Service 01: The Park Service

by Ryan Winfield

  “Now,” he hisses, “now.”

  I pull the rope hard and stand the stick up in the grass, its dead-tethered display flapping lifeless and limp on its end.

  Now what, I wonder.

  They come twisting out of the sky fast—a much smaller flock of the pigeons that passed earlier—and within seconds the ground is covered with them pecking and cooing, chasing one another in circles, no idea yet that they’ve been duped.

  The net comes down in a gorgeous spiral, hovering for a moment in a whoosh of air spun by its stony edges, and then it drops on the confused birds, and he drops from the branches after it. He quickly scoops up the drawstring, sweeps the net around the stunned birds, heaves it up and holds it closed—closed and writhing with fifty flapping pigeons.

  He wrestles the sack to the lake’s edge and I follow.

  Before I can say no, he has me breaking their necks. We take turns reaching in and drawing out the panicked pigeons, flipping them backwards with quick jerks, their necks giving with thin cracks, their fluttering hearts stuttering then ceasing to beat as they go limp in our hands.

  “It’s all in the wrist,” he says.

  At first it takes me several attempts each, but as the pile grows, I get to where I’m almost as quick as he is.

  With the net now empty and a pile of dead pigeons at our feet, he produces a tiny ivory knife from some hidden pocket in his waist. He snatches up a pigeon and cuts a ring just below the tail. Then, in one slick motion, he strips the bird clean of feathers and all, tossing the skin onto the ground where it lays deflated and slimy, wrong side out, perhaps closer resembling some feathered salamander ancestor of a bird. Next, he slides his blade up the rib cage, reaches in and pulls out a handful of slippery guts, tossing them onto the pile, too. I gag a little.

  “This is disgusting,” I say, looking at the pile of parts.

  “It’s called field dressin’,” he says.

  “Well, it looks a lot more like field undressing to me.”

  He chuckles and hands me the dressed bird, pointing to the water. I look at him, confused, the slimy bird cradled like a venomous slug in my palms. He takes the pigeon back and dips it in the lake and runs his fingers inside its disemboweled breast rinsing it clean. Then he rips free a handful of grass and stuffs the grass inside the bird and puts the bird in the bag.

  He nods. I nod.

  Then he strips another. Skin, guts, head—the pile grows. He hands the bird to me and I rinse it clean, fill it with grass, and slip it into the sack, just like he showed me.

  He smiles. “It’s Jimmy, by the way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Jimmy,” he says. “My name’s Jimmy.”

  “I’m Aubrey.”

  “Sounds jus’ like a girl’s name.”

  “Well, Jimmy sounds like slang for a pecker.”

  “What’s a pecker?”

  “Never mind. Aubrey’s a boy’s name, too.”

  We work this way for half an hour, faster and faster, until it takes us less than half a minute to complete a bird. When we finish, the netted sack is bursting with pink approximations of pigeons and three separate piles lie at our feet—feathers, guts, and blank staring pigeon heads looking up into the sky where three red-headed vultures now circle, waiting for us to leave.

  “How ya gonna carry yers?” he asks.

  “Carry my what?”

  “Yer half,” he says, nodding toward the pigeons.

  “I don’t want any.”

  “Suit yerself,” he says, hefting the sack over his shoulder, leaning under its weight, and walking off without another word.

  I chase after.

  “Wait! I want to come with you.”

  “You’s cain’t.”

  “I don’t have anywhere to go,” I say, running ahead of him and blocking his path. “You can’t just leave me out here alone.”

  “Sure can,” he says, moving around me and walking again.

  “I’m coming anyway.”

  “I told ya no,” he says. “They dun’ voted already.”

  “Who voted?”

  “Ever-one.”

  “Voted about me?”

  “Well, who else?”

  “You voted to leave me?” I shout, my voice louder than I expected and echoing back to us from the caldera walls.

  “I ain’t voted.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “’Cause I ain’t been born yet.”

  “You talk funny,” I say.

  “So do you’s.”

  “Well, I don’t like you.”

  “I don’t like you’s neither,” he says.

  I fall in behind and follow anyway. After a few minutes, he glances over his shoulder and scowls at me.

  “How come you’s followin’ me if ya dun’ like me?”

  “Why do you keep talking to me if you don’t like me?”

  He laughs and walks on.

  CHAPTER 9

  Thank You, Robert Frost

  He walks fast.

  Even with the pigeons weighing him down.

  It’s hard for me to keep up, following his shadow across the caldera, climbing out behind him, trailing him south.

  When the plateau rejoins the ocean, he follows its edge as it wears away and drops in natural steps down to rolling dunes of sand. He never breaks for food or water. It’s hot and I sweat my jumpsuit through and then drink from my canteen and sweat it through again. He never looks back, not once. But I know that he knows I’m here. He must be hoping I’ll give up and fall away. I won’t. I’ll match him step for step if he walks the world round. I don’t care who they are or what they voted, I’m not going to give up and die out here alone. If they want me dead, they’ll have to kill me.

  Evening arrives as he leads me into a canyon, inland along some dry riverbed littered with boulders the size of buildings down in Holocene II. He weaves his way expertly around the mammoth rocks, never once halting or checking his direction. Dragging with fatigue, but still committed, I follow behind him slipping and stumbling over lose stones.

  Darkness descends fast in the canyon and before long, the boulders become giant black shadows looming overhead in the night. Suddenly, I realize I’ve lost him. I’m not sure how long I’ve been walking without seeing him ahead, but I’ve lost him. I stop, my path blocked by an enormous boulder. I must go left or right, and in the pitch-black night I don’t know which to choose, or if it even matters anymore. I choose left. Another boulder. Another left. Another. All but a slice of starlit sky is blocked by the towering canyon walls, and I walk blind with my hands stretched before me in the blackness.

  At first, I only see a spark. A tiny red ember climbing on the wind ahead. I round another boulder—yes, there, I’m sure that’s fire I see, the orange glow against the canyon wall. I creep forward. A block of stone sits beneath an overhang and from its other side, the fire casts their shadows on the canyon wall. Tall, elongated shadows. Ten-meter shadow-men painted on the glowing wall, alive and gesturing wildly as if some ancient cave painting from my lesson slate history had animated itself from the night. Then I hear them, their quiet, throaty voices carried with the fire’s embers on the wind.

  “How’d he get here anyways?”

  “Yeah, thought we left ’em at the caves.”

  “I’ll tell ya how? Jimmy here went to find ’em.”

  “Is that true, son?”

  “I’s followin’ pigeons. Ain’t my fault I run into ’em.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Well, he cain’t stay with us, son, he’s one of them.”

  “Papa!” Jimmy pleads. “He’ll die out there alone.”

  “It’s decided already.”

  “He’ll lead ’em right to us.”

  “Ah, let the Park Service have ’em,” another shadow says, tossing a log onto the sparking fire.

  Listening to them, I feel my pulse quicken, the blood rush to my cheeks. Fine then—if they don’t want me, I don’t want them either.
>
  “I’ll take my half now,” I say, stepping around the boulder and into the firelight.

  They all turn to look at me—Jimmy and five other men. They’re circled around the fire facing me. Behind them, against the canyon wall, animal pelts hang dripping from crude stands made of sticks lashed together. Next to the men, some meters off, glows a cooking fire dug into the ground and reduced to coals. An old gray man kneels there, turning one of the pelt’s former occupants on a spit. He looks up momentarily from his roast without expression and then resumes turning it again.

  “Half of what?”

  The man speaking looks like Jimmy’s father. Jimmy nods to the sack of pigeons lying next to the pelts.

  “Well, stake ’em his claim and let ’em scat,” his father says.

  “Cain’t he jus’ stay till morning?” Jimmy says. “Please.”

  I stand just outside the warmth of the fire and watch the flames dancing on the men’s bearded leather faces. Strong men, practical men, resolved men. The fire brightens in a gust, settles again. The old man turns the roast, glistening above the cook fire embers. I’ve never eaten meat before, but the smell sets my mouth watering. A cold wind whips at my back, knocking my empty canteen against the boulder.

  “I can help around camp,” I say.

  “We dun’ need no help.”

  “Everyone needs help.”

  “Not yers.”

  “I can entertain you, then.”

  “Entertain us how?” the father asks.

  “What if I sing for you?”

  “We dun’ need no songs neither.”

  “How about poetry then? I can recite poetry.”

  “What kinda poetry?”

  I step closer into the firelight, buying time to remember a poem from my lesson slate.

  “Okay, how about this?” I clear my throat and recite the only poem I can remember on the spot:

  A voice said, Look me in the stars And tell me truly, men of earth, If all the soul-and-body scars / Were not too much to pay for birth.

  When I finish, the men all stare at me.

  “You’s jus’ made that up now?” one of them asks.

  “No,” I say, laughing. “I read it. That’s Robert Frost.”

  “Go camp with this Frost fella then,” another says.

  “That’s impossible. He’s been dead a thousand years.”

  “That’s too bad,” the father says, “’cause you cain’t stay.”

  The old man looks up from his roast. “He can stay.”

  “What?”

  “Said he can stay.”

  “I heard ya, but …”

  “Cain’t you see this here boy can read?”

  “Well, so what if he can?”

  “Dun’ ya think that mightn’t be some value to us?” the old man asks. “Specially seein’ cain’t none of you’s do it? I’d like my grandbabies to read and write. Sides that, I liked his poem.”

  The old man raises an eyebrow and waits. When there’s no further response from the boy’s father, he signals the end of the discussion by turning back to his roast at the coals.

  “Fine,” the father says, glaring at me. “But jus’ tonight.”

  Jimmy grins and takes me by the hand and pulls me into the circle around the fire. The men go about inspecting their pelts and setting up beds. We hang the birds from a river stick and prop them between two large rocks. The stick bows with the weight of them, fifty little shadows twisting in the wind just outside the firelight, as if trying to remember how to fly.

  When the roast is finished, we sit around the fire and gnaw on greasy handfuls of meat. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever tasted. The fattiest parts almost melt in my mouth, and I can feel the protein seeping already into my tired legs. Nobody talks at all. They just stare into the fire and eat. The flames are mesmerizing. They rise and fall and rise again, lapping at the night in some strange fire dance, as if trying to tell some ancient story in a language forgotten long ago.

  The men finish eating and leave the fire one by one, each of them rustling around in the dark as they lie down on beds of fur, or bits of brush, falling quietly asleep almost right away.

  Now only Jimmy sits across from me, his arms wrapped around his knees as he stares into the flames. I strip the last bit of meat off my last bone and toss it into the fire.

  A long time passes with neither of us saying anything as we sit across the fire from one another. I watch his face glowing in the shadows, his gray eyes sparkling as they reflect back the red embers. He seems to be looking into the coals and beyond to the very center of the Earth.

  “You’s come from below,” he says, “dun’ ya?”

  It’s been quiet for so long that his question catches me by surprise. That, and it’s a strange question.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Look at ya. I ain’t dumb.”

  “No, I wouldn’t imagine you are.”

  Must be my outfit, I think. That and my sunburn maybe. It seems like a lifetime ago already. The train crash, the elevator goodbye, the test—all of Holocene II, really. And something one of the other men said earlier is bothering me, too. He said something about letting the Park Service have me.

  “Why’d that man say to let the Park Service have me?”

  “Oh, dun’ mind that. That’s jus’ Uncle John talkin’,” he says, tossing a pebble into the coals.

  “But what is the Park Service? Why would they want me?”

  “Ya really dun’ know?” he asks, looking up from the coals and searching my face.

  “Know what?”

  “All this is parkland,” he says, unfolding his arms from his knees and spreading them out wide, as if to take in the world.

  “So?” I say, shrugging.

  “So, they’ll kill ya if they find ya here.”

  “Who will kill me?”

  “The Park Service, ya dummy,” he says, shaking his head. “They’ll kill ya dead. Kill me, kill ever last one of us. And they do it, too. Do it all the time.”

  “Well, why don’t we just leave the park then?”

  “Because we cain’t leave,” he laughs.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Ya cain’t ever leave the park,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s all park. The whole damn surface belongs to ’em.”

  “Who is them?” I ask, more confused than ever.

  “The Park Service.”

  “Well, who on Earth is the Park Service?”

  He stands and brushes himself off and looks down at me.

  “You’s are,” he says, walking off toward the sleeping men.

  I sit alone beside the fire and think about what he said. I’m not sure what this Park Service he’s talking about is, or why it hunts these poor people, but I do know that my people down in Holocene II have nothing to do with it. No way.

  Something is going on, though, and I wonder what. Where was that train headed? Why was it crossing those mountains? And why is the surface not covered in ice? And not just that, but who are these people up here?

  The fire burns down until only a few coals glow from the bed of dark ash, pulsing there like some buried heart throbbing against the coming cold death of night. I curl up close, catching its lingering heat, and thank Robert Frost as I drift off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 10

  Welcome to the Cove

  The fire is nothing but ash.

  The ground is hard and cold.

  In the dim light of dawn I see that the men are gone from where they slept, and so are the pelts, and so are the birds. Fully awake, I jump to my feet to set out and find them. When I turn around, Jimmy thrusts a pack at me.

  “Try to keep up,” he says.

  The pack is lashed together from sticks strung with animal skin and it’s piled high with pelts and dangling with naked birds now shriveled in the open air. I heave it on and nearly topple over backwards. Jimmy straps his pack on, pausing to show me how to stand straight and let my legs take the weight. With o
ur towering packs, we walk side by side like two strange and furry beetles crawling out of the canyon.

  Jimmy doesn’t mention our fireside conversation last night and neither do I. We walk south again following the coast at a distance, and soon the landscape changes from scrub brush and dunes to fields of short grass rustling in the ocean breeze. After several hours walking, we enter a solemn redwood forest where the trees reach more than a hundred meters each into the sky. It’s quiet, a mist still rising off the moss on the forest floor.

  Coming to an enormous tree, its trunk ten meters across, Jimmy slips off his pack and lies down on his back in a beam of sunlight filtering through the branches. I slip my pack off, too, and stand there marveling at the majestic giants all around.

  “Number one rule of packin’,” Jimmy says, his head resting in his hands, “we dun’ stand when we can sit, and we dun’ sit when we can lie down.”

  I drop down beside him, looking up at the redwood rising to a distant green point piercing the blue sky above. I feel as though we’ve been shrunken—two brother ants reclining on the forest floor, our chests rising and falling together, breathing fresh forest air in, breathing our differences out.

  “Ain’t it beautiful?” he says.

  “You have no idea,” I reply, marveling at the ancient tree and remembering reading in my lesson slate about them. About how we cut them down to near nothing, then wiped the rest out in the dark years of the War.

  “How old do you think they are?” I ask.

  “Oh, I dunno exactly,” he says, biting his lip and thinking. “My pa says one tall as this’n is near two thousand years old.”

  And then it hits me, what I was thinking, why I asked—two-thousand-year old trees right in front of me. The War that drove us underground was not even a thousand years ago, which means this tree must predate it. The lessons lied. Some things did survive. I want to ask Jimmy about his people, about his family. I want to ask him how long they’ve been on the run from this Park Service they talk about. I want to ask him what he meant when he said that I was one of them.