The Park Service 01: The Park Service

by Ryan Winfield

  “We’ve jus’ always been here.”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah, we’s Americans.”

  “Native Americans?”

  “I dunno. Jus’ Americans, I guess.”

  “Well, tell me about the Park Service then.”

  He sighs. “All I know is stories they pass down.”

  “Okay. Tell me those then.”

  So he tells me about his people surviving a great war and migrating to the coast in search of food. He tells me they came to vast cities, destroyed and empty. He says they settled there and began to rebuild. And then the Park Service came.

  “There was no safety,” he says. “No place for us to hide. Machines, ships, flyers. Even the stars was shadowed by drones killin’ our people. Least that’s what they tells me.”

  “What did they do?”

  “Went on the run,” he says. “Hunting and hunted.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The Park Service?”

  “Yeah, the Park Service.”

  “I dunno. Nobody knows.”

  “Well, why’d you think I was one of them?”

  He points to the faded Foundation crest on my jumpsuit.

  “It’s no connection to them,” I say.

  He shrugs. “What’s it matter fer anyhow?”

  “Don’t you want to fight back? Change things?”

  “Change things? It’s how things is. It’s how they’s always been far back as stories tell. Many, many moons now,” he says, “and will be fer many more to come.”

  Then he stops and turns to me.

  “Ya remember that thing ya did that nigh by the fire?”

  “What night?”

  “The first night,” he says. “The poem.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Can ya really read?”

  “Sure, I can read.”

  “Good,” he says, smiling. “Follow me.”

  He leads me up a narrow path into the red-rock cliffs. We climb high, passing exposed bulkheads of rock with shells and fossils peeking out from their weathered faces and I wonder at the strange fact that all this was once under sea. He stops when we arrive at the opening of a cave.

  “Ya dun’ mind goin’ in, do ya?

  “No, I don’t mind. Really. I’m fine.”

  Stepping inside, he uses his flint and stone to light one of several torches waiting there. He offers one to me, but I wave it away and follow him into the cave. The opening fades behind us and our world shrinks to the ball of light cast by the torch. The flame flickers in the musty air, sometimes almost touching the ceiling of low passageways, sometimes casting a faint glow on stalactites hanging high above like teeth ready to close down and swallow us forever into the belly of the Earth.

  I feel panic creeping on, a familiar feeling of being closed in, trapped with no escape, the way I felt the first fifteen years of my life. I breathe in, breathe out, and follow Jimmy deeper.

  Reaching a small circular cavern, he touches his torch to others waiting propped in the cracked walls, and with each new flame, the cave’s contents come more clearly into view.

  It’s an underground junkyard, a hoarder’s heaven—but to Jimmy it might as well be Tutankhamun’s tomb.

  He leads me around the room, touching everything once as if to make sure it’s still there. Strange, leftover things. Things I recognize from lessons and educationals, things that must be a mystery to Jimmy. A rusty manifold from some ancient internal combustion engine. Two warped wheels without tires. A boat propeller with a broken blade. An iron post. Bits of glass. Antique transistors. A green-plastic circuit board from some twenty-first century computer.

  When he finishes touching everything, he leads me to an old rusted oil drum resting in the farthest corner. Propping his torch up, he reaches his arm inside and removes something heavy, wrapped in oil-soaked leather. He stands holding it in his arms, caressing it as if it were a pet.

  “This is a big, big treasure,” he says, his eyes both excited and solemn at the same time. “It was recovered from the city before we left. My people keep it hidden here many centuries now. This here …,” he pauses to hold up his covered treasure, “This is our foundin’ father.”

  “One of the first presidents?”

  “Maybe even a god,” he says. “My grandpapa was named after him, my papa. Even me. My son I will name fer him, too. And then maybe even he has a son to name James.”

  He pauses, staring into my eyes, the torch flame reflecting on his black pupils. Then he continues:

  “My pa says it is our duty to multiply, to carry on the race. He says we’re seeds. He says we must survive until a golden time comes again. It is our duty, our right. You understand?”

  I nod that I do.

  “Good,” he says, nodding, too. “I need a favor from ya.”

  “Sure,” I say. “Anything.”

  “None of us can read. Well, not much anyways. I hoped ya could read me this writin’ here.”

  He holds the heavy treasure out in his trembling hand, and with the other he pulls the leather cover free, revealing a bronze sculpture of a man’s head. A gleaming bust, worn and polished by a thousand years, a hundred hands, but an unmistakable and boyish face with thick wavy hair and perfect features—features I recognize immediately from lessons on American culture.

  He twists it so I can see all sides in the torchlight, then he points to a plaque at its base. The plaque is etched with dates, the name, an inscription honoring the man and his short career.

  “What’s it say?” he asks, excited, pushing it closer to me, turning it gently under the light.

  I study the writing long enough to read it three times.

  “Can ya read it?”

  “Just the name,” I say. “James—just like you.”

  “Nothin’ else, though?”

  I shake my head no.

  “No? Ya sure?”

  “Listen, it’s a beautiful bust, and I’m sure you’re right—he must have been some kind of idol from the past.”

  He sighs. Frowns. Runs his fingers over the plaque and the text etched there, as alien and as dead to him as Latin would be to me. Maybe more so. Then he accepts it and nods. Covering the bust again, he returns it back to the bottom of its barrel. He stands and collects his torch and snuffs the others out and leads me from the cavern out the way we came.

  I look back once at the darkness swallowing the room, our shadows stretched long and quivering on the torch-lit floor as if lingering behind to stay there forever with the past, and I have the strange premonition that no soul will ever see it again.

  I feel bad about myself for having lied to Jimmy—but I just couldn’t tell him that James Dean was just a movie star.

  CHAPTER 13

  Rites of Passage

  Three times the conch shell blasts.

  As if answering the call, a super moon rises above the bluff and casts its silver spotlight down on the cove.

  “I’m nervous,” Jimmy whispers.

  “Me too,” I say, my hands covering my nakedness.

  Aunt Salinas blows the shell again, the men begin dancing around the fire, their twisted shadows cast onto the sand. They howl and scream, clouds of breath rising like ghosts against the dark sky. Then they stop. In the sudden silence, I can hear the children giggling from their tent flaps behind us.

  “You’s better go to sleep,” Jimmy hisses at them. Then he turns back to me. “Sure ya wanna do this? Ya dun’ have to.”

  “I know, but if you’re doing it, I’m doing it.”

  The men stand at the fire, waiting. Their heads hung, their arms crossed. The women circle around them. Then they begin to wail, their arms flailing about, their voices riding the night. When they finish, they kneel on the ground, creating a pathway between us and the men at the fire.

  Jimmy and I step up, stripped and trembling.

  The women reach across the path they’ve made and grip one another’s arms, creating a tunnel, a human arch, wri
thing, waving, inviting us in. Jimmy ducks beneath them and crawls through the tunnel toward the fire. When he comes out the other side, the men pull him into their circle, his father forcing him to the ground and sitting on his chest. The knife glints like a fish in the firelight as he lowers the blade to Jimmy’s waist. I watch with horror as he tugs and saws, his head bent and focused on his work. Jimmy doesn’t even make a sound. His father finishes, holding up the bloody knife in one hand and the results of his work hanging lifeless and limp in the other.

  My legs go wobbly. I think I might faint.

  Jimmy’s father pulls him up to his feet and embraces him. Someone paints charcoal on his cheek. Then they circle the fire again, dancing and howling, Jimmy with them now, until they come to rest and stand still, waiting for me.

  I drop to my knees, and crawl beneath the arch of arms. They press down against me and I’m trapped in a living canal, forced to my belly, squirming, crawling along the tunnel toward the fire. They press closer, smothering me with their bosoms. My breath quickens and I push forward, harder, faster. They close tight around me and just when I think I’ll surely suffocate, I burst free into the firelight and the circle of waiting men.

  Jimmy’s father forces me to the ground and sits on my chest. I smell his sweat, feel the weight of him pressing me into the sand. I see the blade’s shadow as he bends to his work, but I feel nothing. Then he releases me. I lift my head with horror, but other than my nakedness, there’s not much to see.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, feebly, uncomfortable and nervous with everyone’s eyes on me.

  “You’s cut already.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  Jimmy points. “Da cirkemsizhen.”

  “Circumcision? They do that when we’re babies.”

  “Babies?” he says, looking confused. “That’s barbaric.”

  “Is okay,” the eldest man says. “Jest finish the rites.”

  Jimmy clasps my hand and pulls me up. Someone paints charcoal on my cheeks. Then I’m swept into the circle, dancing and howling around the fire. Faster now. Everyone. All taut muscle and hot sweat and charcoal dripping. The women skip, turning in the opposite direction, mixing in and out of the men. The moon shines down and the night hangs heavy with joy, the cool air infused with the scents of bodies and salt and fire.

  Aunt Salinas blows the conch and everyone stops.

  We fall exhausted where we stand into piles and heaps on the ground, everyone laughing and relaxed.

  I lean into Jimmy and he pushes my sweaty hair away from my brow. I look up at him and he smiles. I smile. We don’t say it, but we both know that things will never be the same again—never after this night, because after this night we’re men.

  We lie beneath the moon and let the fire burn down. A gourd passes filled with some kind of sweet milk. A basket of fruit appears. We eat and drink and breathe, but nobody says a word. When Aunt Salinas blows the conch again, people begin to rise. One by one we all get up and drift away to our tents and retire to reflect in solitude and then drift off into whatever wild dreams might visit us each on this free and uninhibited night.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Butterfly Waits

  Kids crying all night.

  In the morning, they crawl tired from their tents itching and scratching their raw scalps.

  Jimmy’s mother orders everyone to leave camp so she can turn out our tents and treat the bedding. Jimmy piles with the men into boats and they shove off to drop nets. The mothers take their children to collect crabs for stew, and they march off down the beach, a dozen little arms raised and scratching at a dozen little heads. I stand around wondering what I should do.

  “Maybe ya won’t mind collectin’ some poppies?” Jimmy’s mother says, handing me a leather pouch.

  “Poppies? You mean the little yellow flowers?”

  “Them’s the ones,” she says.

  “What for?”

  “We grind ’em up and dry ’em,” she says. “Makes a paste to kill the lice.”

  With a canteen around my neck and my pockets filled with dried fish, I head out from the cove carrying the poppy pouch.

  The bluff above the cove is rocky, the only plants being scrub brush and sawgrass, but farther inland the bluff drops down into a lush valley where I stroll beneath a shaded canopy of trees, on the lookout for the little yellow flowers.

  Soon the path turns into a thick tangle of thorny bushes and I use a stick to beat them back. I walk east, knowing that if I lose my way I can follow the setting sun back to the coast and the cove. Tearing through a thick patch of brush, I step into a small, circular clearing where the grass has been bedded down. There, staring at me with large, dewy eyes, is a mother elk with her baby attached to her tit. Her eyes are the deepest black of any I’ve ever seen and my reflection stands there in each one, my stick upheld as if to murder her with it. I’m surprised by her calm and steady gaze, devoid of any fear. A feeling of embarrassment comes over me, as if I’ve interrupted something sacred. I back from the clearing and take another path around.

  I find the poppies in the shade of a big oak. They grow in a ring around the trunk, so yellow and bright that they cast a warm glow upward onto the dark bark. It feels almost a shame to pick them, but I quickly fill the pouch.

  It doesn’t take me long to realize that I’m lost. The thick canopy hides the sun, and I can only guess which way is west. Every time I think I’ve got it right, the sun peeks through in the wrong place, forcing me to correct course. Around stumps, over the gnarled roots of rotting trees, bypassing impossible blackberry vines covered in thorns, I move on and on and on. After hours of going nowhere, I know I’m walking in circles.

  When the rain comes, it comes without warning.

  One moment the warm forest is filled with chirping birds, an instant later it’s silent and dark, the rain gushing down all around me. It falls in heavy drops, thrashing leaves overhead, leaning plants, dripping to the forest floor. I’m soaked in sixty seconds. The ground grows muddy. Puddles appear. I splash through them and walk toward what I hope is still west.

  The water brings new life up from the forest floor. Frogs croaking, slugs slithering, a giant salamander sliding across my feet in a stream that only a moment ago wasn’t even there. The rain keeps coming until I can hardly remember a time before. A bog sucks my shoes from my feet, the tattered material finally tearing when I try to retrieve them, so I leave them sticking in the mud like abandoned oyster shells and walk on barefoot.

  It rains and it rains and it rains.

  And then it stops.

  As quickly as it began, the rain ceases and the golden light returns to the canopy. Great droplets of water hang from leaves like heavy crystals just waiting to be plucked, dripping onto the forest floor and then growing again. The frogs fade, the birds sing. I push on, whacking drenched growth with my stick, the rainwater bursting into little rainbow showers as I hack them down, and then I step into the most amazing view.

  Before me, a strange field of leafy vines stretches almost as far as I can see, dotted everywhere with alien pods. A hundred, a thousand, a million glistening melons, golden in the stormy light of an enormous rainbow arching over the field with the retreating storm clouds piling up behind it.

  I inch into the field, not wanting to disturb the moment. Reaching down, I pick a melon and weigh it in my hand—the thick skin pocked and coarse, the melon heavy and cool. I cut it open with Uncle John’s knife and bury my teeth in the fruit. The flavor explodes in my mouth, sweeter than anything I’ve ever tasted. Within minutes, I’m standing with juice dripping down my chin and holding an empty rind. I eat another, and another after that. The rainbow fades.

  When I’m stuffed so far beyond full that it hurts, I pick through the vines, collecting the best melons and piling them at the edge of the patch. Some are too green, others too ripe, a few cracked open and rotting with splotches of mold covering them like green fur. But most are just right. It would take six hundred people six
months to pick them all, and I quit only a few meters into the patch when I realize my pyramid of fruit is already too tall for me to carry.

  I gather them in my arms and start off west into the setting sun, feeling like some loaded lunatic melon juggler walking off in search of an audience to entertain. Every few steps I drop a melon, and when I stop to collect it again, I drop more. My dad would have called it an idiot load. I carry on like this until so many melons have dashed themselves open on the ground that the stack is reduced to a manageable size. I look back once from a hill and see a trail of mangled melons marking my path.

  When I get to the cove, Jimmy’s mother is yelling at him.

  The camp is swept clean, the tents open and airing out, and everyone mills about listening to Jimmy get admonished in his mother’s tent. She’s telling him about honor, about being a man. About integrity and respecting personal property. And when her voice finally fades I hear Jimmy whimpering in soft apology. Then they step out from the tent and everyone averts their eyes and pretends not to be listening.

  Now that the drama is over, the children see me and rush to take the melons from my arms, jumping in little circles and begging to eat them while aunts and uncles warn them to wait until after supper. I hand the pouch of poppies to Jimmy’s mother and she thanks me. Jimmy stands beside her with his head hung. She nudges him in the ribs with an elbow. He looks up and he has tears in his eyes.

  “I owe’s ya an apology,” he says.

  Then, after another nudge in the ribs, he reaches into his pocket and hands me my father’s pipe.

  My father’s pipe!

  I’d forgotten all about it these last few months in the cove, hadn’t even missed it. I look at the pipe in my palm and I’m back in Holocene II, sitting at the table with my father, hearing him tell me about how proud he is of me and how my mother would be, too. I look back up at Jimmy and we’re both crying.

  He runs off, leaving me alone with his mother.

  She takes my arm then, leading me down to the beach and the log where I sat and ate her stew my first night in the cove. We sit side by side and stare off into the setting sun.