The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  ‘Winnipeg,’ I said slowly, stabbing my finger again.

  ‘Ah! Winnipeg,’ he said, motioning forward.

  I did not know what to do. I must have looked forlorn and he smiled, said ‘Winnipeg’ cheerfully and motioned forward again. I did not believe him but what could I do, jump out of a moving vehicle? Was I certain enough to tell him to stop and leave me at the side of the road? It was going to start to get dark soon and it might be better to presume we would end up in a floodlit lorry park than to risk the side of the road at night. He had to stop somewhere legit, another service station with other lorries and people. You can’t just go off-road and incognito with a lorry.

  ‘How far?’

  I tried to act out distance with my hands.

  ‘How long until Winnipeg?’

  ‘Ah! Winnipeg soon soon. Yes, soon,’ he said.

  ‘Soon?’

  ‘Soon.’

  We drove on; the yolk of the sun spilt on the horizon and the sky got inky. He turned his headlights on and with the dark I began to feel panic really set in. I could see a reservation coming up to our left. An indigenous woman stood at the side of the road in a very short skirt. He pointed at her and laughed like a hyena. The woman winced when the headlights and the sound of his horn hit her face.

  A little later, as the headlights breached the trees, you could see the land where the forest had been clear-cut. It stuck in your throat how it was so dense and dark and enclosing then, suddenly, barren, the sky bursting through, the weak light of it pooling out over the feebler trees they left behind, scattered like redundant matchsticks. It must have stretched for miles, naked and vulnerable like a head shaved for neurosurgery. In the far distance a town sat lit up like a cluster of glow-worms. The tick-tick of his indicator started up and we steered onto a gravel path, up towards a closed diner cabin and a portaloo where one other lorry was parked with its lights out. No floodlights.

  We ground to a halt and he tapped something into the meter, which played a triumphant little jingle. He said something and patted then shook my knee, grinning, and there was the spittle again. I pulled away and asked where we were. And he said something else with his hand back on my knee. I said Winnipeg really resolutely this time. He made the universal sign for sleeping and nodded up to the bed.

  ‘Winnipeg tomorrow.’

  ‘No. I’m not sleeping here. I need to get to Winnipeg now.’

  ‘Winnipeg tomorrow.’

  ‘No, I—’ I started to say through gritted teeth. He said something very firmly, then grabbed my thigh and ran his hand up to my groin.

  I pushed then kicked his arm away from me. We faced each other for a few seconds, each waiting to see what the other would do next. I had to move closer to him to move around the seat so I snaked my body without breaking eye contact so that I could see where his hands were. I grabbed my rucksack and camera strap with one hand, pulled myself back over with the other and, panicky, wrestled with the stiff door handle.

  Meanwhile he sat back into his seat, saying things between his jerky hyena cackles. As I prised the door open and threw my bag out he lurched for me. I threw myself down from the tall cab on top of my bag as I felt his hand tighten on my ankle, lose grip, and clutch at my shoe. My foot slipped from it as I fell.

  I scrambled up, swung my bag on my shoulder and put the camera strap around my neck. Then at a safe distance, I glared back at him. He held my shoe in his hand, laughing, and I was filled with so much furious hatred for him I wanted to take a stone and smash his greasy head with it. I wanted to wrestle my shoe back out of his hands and slap it on his face. I thought maybe I would, maybe the danger had passed now, maybe the danger was only ever his violating hands, which were no longer on me. But then he lurched towards me again, making a mocking sort of animal grunt; I started to run.

  I ran flat out back down the gravel path towards the dark highway. On the road I headed the way we had come, back in the direction of the reservation, I suppose because taking the road towards the town would have meant running parallel to the park, where he could have scrambled down the slope and intercepted me. The ground where the trees were cut was littered with stumps and amputations. I ran hard, away from the lorry park and the distant lights of the town and towards the blotted darkness of the forest.

  I was running running running and everything hurt but blind panic kept me moving forward and clouded the jolts in my left heel, the one that had no shoe. I had been running for about ten minutes when the pain of it got too much and I limped to a halt, bent with my hands on my knees, looking behind.

  Can he see me?

  No, can’t see the park now.

  But he would have seen which way, following the road.

  I started to walk forward, trying to keep my heel off the ground and looking behind me. I stopped, remembering my boots tied to my bag. Brushing the bottom of my foot, I squinted at my hands. It was too dark to see much properly, but I felt stickiness between my fingers. My heel was bleeding.

  I did not want to stop so I shoved the boots on and kept pressure off the heel, abandoning the other shoe in the scree by the road. Eventually I decided that probably he had not followed but I could not turn back, had to carry on ahead, just keep moving.

  I felt really suddenly like I wanted to scream and hit myself. How could I have been so stupid? And look at me now, stupid and limping and alone in the dark on a road god knows where at night being what I set out not to be reduced to, fulfilling for everyone who worried and foresaw it, and what now? This is not my world to walk in. I wanted without thinking my phone from my bag. I needed a voice to be with me. I rummaged inside and brought out the torch.

  Don’t put the torch on!

  Fuck! I scrabbled to turn it off. I hugged the rucksack to me and started to shake and whimper pathetically. Who would I call exactly? What could they do from the other side of the world? I told myself out loud this is your mess, sniffled into my sleeve and started walking quickly onward. The weak moonlight was strobing through the moving canopy, lighting things up in jolts like club lighting.

  Into the forest?

  I don’t want to get lost in the forest.

  But it’s so risky to keep to the road.

  I decided to carry on up the road to the reservation. Sit behind a building where I was not in the open. Find a shed or something. Until the morning. I broke into a little trot again. The indifferent trees spun, they were so high above me; the tough long grass lashed against my legs from the roadside. The road itself was lit up like a silver beacon by the moon, leading up and on and on. The trees were hush-hushing, but the sound of panic beat on my eardrums. I had to keep stopping to get my breath and readjust my rucksack. Then at some point I remembered the camera.

  I need something to complete the sequence.

  You and that fucking documentary!

  I took a bit of footage of the road shaking with my running. Then I noticed the figure on the road up ahead. I stopped running but carried on approaching at limping pace because there was nowhere else to go, and besides, they had already seen me. They raised their hand. They were just ahead of the reservation.

  I put my hand in the air. The figure put theirs down. As I got nearer I could tell it was a woman, which made me feel easier. Nearer still, the woman from the headlights. Then I was stood in front of her, gasping.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked in a soft voice. I could not answer from panting. ‘I saw you running.’

  ‘I ran from. The lorry park,’ I managed.

  ‘Why were you running?’

  ‘There was a man. In the lorry—’

  But then I do not know because the sky dimmed to black and some sirens started and my knees buckled under a huge pressure that came both from above my head and out of my body at once, and I fell to the floor. The woman went to catch me, I think, because when I came to I was half on the ground and half in her arms, but my leg was twisted under me and she had got on her knees to scoop me into a sitting position. My knees were g
ashed. It struck me how lost and young I must have seemed right then to this stranger. I feel embarrassed now at this image of me like a broken doll but I did not feel embarrassed right then, because I felt too much relief that the sick pressure was gone from my stomach, that the loss of consciousness had come on me like an anaesthetising sleep that takes pain away and the sweat all over my body was now a cooling balm to the heat. It is a familiar feeling, and by now I am used to the loss of control, and feel less disempowered just letting it happen rather than struggling against it. It makes me feel Victorian and weak.

  ‘Oh no. All right. All right. Will you be okay here for five minutes? I can go and get my truck. You’re exhausted. I’ll go and get my truck. I’m Rochelle. I’ll be right back.’ Then she got up and ran up the path into the reservation. As she left, I wanted so badly for her not to go and leave me to be enveloped by the darkness. I sat and tore at blades of dry grass and shook, from adrenaline or shock, or something.

  After a few minutes Rochelle came back with her truck and drove me to her caravan, where she picked out the gravel from my foot and put a brown ointment from a jam jar on it then bandaged it up with plasters. She gave me this thing called ‘flybread’ to eat and a savoury tea, telling me the history of the bread. It was made from flour and lard, invented in 1860-something by the Navajo people, who were given the ingredients by the US when they were forced into a 300-mile relocation from Arizona to New Mexico. She told me her mother was Navajo and had died of diabetes from eating too much flybread. She ate it too without a tinge of irony and so I thanked her for it.

  Rochelle gave me blankets and set up her electric heater next to me on her sofa. I woke up when she came into the room with the sun in the morning wearing a full velour tracksuit and wrapping herself in a thick leather coat from the back of the door. She lit a cigarette and started making a pot of coffee without saying anything. I wondered if she had forgotten I was there, if it was even possible to miss me in this tiny space. I had the feeling I should not talk. I shifted my position so I could look out of the window.

  Outside I could see the neighbouring trailer, its smashed window blocked up with a bin-liner that tremored in the wind. Next to the trailer was the exoskeleton of a car, its tyres deflated and so sunk into the ground that it looked as though it was melting. It was brown with rust, rainbowed with spray-paint, with no glass in the windows and bullet holes in its side, dark and ringed at the edges like pockmarks of disease.

  Rochelle placed the coffee on the coffee table in front of me and sat opposite on a stool that she moved directly into the beam of light from the window, even though it made her squint, and basked like a lizard does. Dust drifted past her face and caught the light like glitter. Her cigarette smoke was dense in the light, an eel curling through the dust motes. She poured the coffee carefully with the cigarette tucked in the corner of her mouth, talking around it.

  She said a lot of stuff too that I did not process all of, being hazy and still reeling and replaying things as she talked. ‘I suppose I should say you shouldn’t have put yourself in danger like that but I guess you weren’t to know any better. It happens. Sometimes girls go missing, but not usually white girls.’ I remember that bit because her tone changed. ‘It can happen out here because it’s kind of a forgotten backwater. But anyway it didn’t happen. Nothing happened. You were lucky. Or unlucky or neither, a close call. That’s all.’ Then she looked directly at me and I had to look away.

  She was surprisingly forthcoming but in a very detached way, as though thinking aloud to herself. Nothing she said really invited participation. She looked out of the window as she spoke, at two small children who had started poking sticks into the bullet holes. Making a porcupine, she said.

  Rochelle has lived on the reservation all her life, apart from four years when she lived on the road with her ex-boyfriend. They met in one of the bars, in the town I saw lit up in the distance the night before. Her ex-boyfriend was a hippy and had always wanted an Indian girlfriend, called her his Pocahontas. They broke up because he wanted to move onto the reservation with her, but it made her more and more uneasy the way he would braid his hair and wear a headband and keep pestering her to arrange a naming ceremony for him, how his favourite film was Dances with Wolves.

  The transcendental open-mindedness of the liberal white man! So free of cultural constraints, free-spirited and open to the other! Many levels progressed from the Enlightenment specimen collectors! What almond skin, what glossy hair, I can’t kill and stuff it, no no, how barbaric. I will parade it around living and glorious! We only view our animals on safari now!

  She started to feel as though he wanted her as a prized possession, or maybe even just a ticket to somewhere else. As though casting off his own civilisation and shrugging on something antithetical, her culture, the uncivilised one.

  It seemed to bug her to talk to me, like it made her squirm, but a silence would be too heavy with my presence inside her small home. We got on to the topic of the documentary and she asked about it. I wasn’t sure if I should tell her explicitly, right after what just happened. But I decided, she will get it, I mean, the white man is her historical enemy. She laughed, not in a condescending way, really just a non-committal laugh that could have meant anything. She said, ‘The freedom to roam free like a white man, hey?’

  Later on she said she wanted to show me something and then she would take me to town. When we left the reservation people were sat and stood about in groups, chatting and smoking. A couple of dark and long-haired guys loped coolly on actual frisky-spirited horses. They all stared at me. I got right into the truck under Rochelle’s instruction. Someone called out ‘Hey, Rochelle’, and she just called back hey, climbing in the driver’s side and starting the engine before she had even shut the door. A twenty-something boy scooted up to her window and tapped on it. She let out a sigh then rolled down the window a couple of inches.

  ‘Hey, Walt.’

  ‘Hey, Rochelle. Hey,’ he said to me, craning around her door to where I sat in the back and grinning. I said hello back and I felt the most British and accented I have done since leaving.

  ‘Where you going, hey?’ he asked her.

  ‘Just to town.’

  ‘What you goin’ to town for?’

  ‘Just got to drop some things, is all. Mind it.’ And she pulled the truck away jerkily.

  We drove a little way away from the reservation in the truck. She took us into the trees that skirt the far side. We walked uphill a little way until we came to a clearing. There were bottles strewn everywhere, tyres and large black scaffolds and needles, almost chaos but arranged in a rough circle around a nucleus, a fire pit.

  ‘We tell the kids not to come here so of course they come. We used to put up fences but they just pushed them down. If we stand here too long you’ll get a headache. They like to get dizzy off the fumes.’

  She points out the still pool gathered where the dirt slopes down. There is a filmy rainbow spilt across it. A dead crow floats bloated belly up in it and I notice then that no birds are singing. There is not a sound aside from the trees swaying, and there is a tangy smell that makes your eyes sting a little. Even the sunlight seems anaemic where it reaches the pool’s surface.

  ‘The younger kids have mostly given up on the land, when they just see it dumped on like this. Nobody else wants it in their backyard so the state pays us to dump their shit here. The elders are angry at the young for trading the land for money. The young are angry with the reservation and think there’s better stuff for them on the outside that money can buy. They don’t speak the language much any more. But most of them will never leave. You know, before white men came we had a matriarchy. Figure that into your documentary.’

  At this point I realised that she was putting herself through telling me this even though it made her uncomfortable, because she felt it was important. I had the thought that she was telling me because she attached importance to me making a documentary, like she had found a vessel for her m
essage to the outside world. But then I dismissed it, because it did not feel like that at all. It felt like she had a lesson for me.

  The cesspool sticks with me and the smell will follow me for days. Dump waste on poor people because they are non-people and even if they shout about it no one can hear them. Indians are just layabouts and alcoholics who refuse to get jobs and live off the money they were given for their sacred lands, not so sacred if they chose to sell them anyway, hey? Somebody has to take the collateral damage, to aid progress. In On the Road Jack Kerouac had the foresight to say that ‘the earth is an Indian thing’, right before he went to a whorehouse to purchase some Mexican Indian women.

  I asked Rochelle if she knew who Henrietta Lacks was. She did not. Henrietta Lacks is a mascot of bioethics, and systematic medical experimentation on poor and invisible people. Henrietta Lacks was a working-class African-American woman in the 1950s, which made her a non-person too. Scientists sewed a piece of radium inside her and told her it was aggressive treatment for her cervical cancer. She died eight months later at the age of thirty-one. Without asking they sliced two pieces of tissue from her cervix. They called these cells HeLa.

  Thousands of metric tonnes of HeLa have been grown and used for research. The cells of her lady-parts were used to find a polio vaccine and a treatment for Parkinson’s and NASA sent some into orbit to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. Pharmaceutical companies made billions off the back of her but she is barely remembered and her family live in poverty. They did not even know about HeLa until scientists asked them twenty-five years after she died if they could take their cells too. In 2010, fifty-nine years after she died, her grave got an epitaph.

  Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever.

  Her story is a sad one. But it has light to it. Henrietta Lacks is immortal, she is a time capsule, a legacy in the lady-parts of a poor African-American woman.

  Rochelle said, ‘What good is that to Henrietta Lacks?’

  After that she hardly spoke but insisted on driving me the rest of the way to Winnipeg. She would not take any petrol money but let me buy her a coffee in a diner in town. We had a stilted conversation about my plans, where I was headed next, but it all felt hopelessly futile and I could see her thinking so as she picked at the rim of her Styrofoam cup. After the coffee I said a clumsy thank-you. She said don’t mention it and swung herself into her truck. Before she drove away she leant out and said, you take care. I watched it kick up gravel as it clutched its way back onto the road, winding out back in the direction of the distant hunching conifers that camouflage the reservation.