by Noy Holland
Rose held out her hand for a Lorna Doone. They were perfect. They were from the 1960s.
She would be dead before she got it to her mouth.
“Tell me something,” I told Rose. “Tell me a cute little story.”
“Fuck off,” Rose said.
I was choked up. I ate slowly, my love, my last Lorna Doone, my old bloody country.
AT LAST THE ESCALADE
Well worth it, well worth it, the last of the legendary glaciers and cell phone service besides. They have seen a wolf and bighorn sheep and a hundred cheeping pikas in the rocks and a pair of boxing marmots.
But the littlest is a little let down. They have to get back to Ohio, back to the hover-mother and school. He has to pee. So bad. He can’t stand it. So the father pulls off at Sunrise Gorge. There’s a waterfall and people around. Soon the water is falling in the sunlit gorge and the little boy is peeing on a little rock and the big brother pees on a bigger rock and the father has his out, too.
Here a bear appears from between the trees and stands a while to watch them. It’s just watching.
They can’t pee anymore. They have waited so long to see a bear they can scarcely even believe it’s a bear.
“It’s a bear,” says the bigger boy.
The father says, lowly, “Boys.”
It will eat me first, thinks the littler boy, and the bear thinks, Indeed.
The father makes a gutsy father sound and stands his ground bravely between the bear and his boys and the bear leaves the path to trot around him. The bear wants that little boy. That boy is doing exactly what his father says and walking backward toward the Escalade but the bear is trotting frontward at him. The boy turns and runs, which you are not supposed to do, but, lucky boy, because the bear turns and opens his mouth at the other brother.
Don’t run, say the pamphlets, don’t shout.
“Don’t run!” shouts the father and now the other brother is running too and you can bet if they hadn’t peed three seconds ago, they would all be peeing now. The bear is closing in on the bigger boy, the bigger boy is the father’s favorite boy, it’s true. The father runs shouting down the path at the bear with his car keys scratching in his pants.
At last the Escalade.
But the doors are all locked, the littlest boy tried, so the boys try diving under the car. The bigger boy is giggling now, it makes no sense but so what.
A crowd has begun to gather, oh, a bear, they have waited so long to see.
The bear takes a swipe at the boys beneath the car. The boys roll across the gravel to the other side, so the bear trots over to the other side and takes a swipe and they roll off again.
The crowd loves it, how like a circus, stupid but you have to admit.
The father shouts and waves his arms and the hover-mother sips iced tea with a sprig of mint with the shades cinched tight while her boys roll fast and away from the face and the terrible yellow claws of the bear and the dreadful meaty breath of the bear and the little one bleeds, nicked in the ribs, and socks his brother for laughing.
The father makes a claw with his car keys thrust between his chubby fingers—to do what, he doesn’t know, go for the eyes, but instead he whips his keys at the bear’s awful face—you guessed it, the car is still locked.
A button springs out from the little boy’s shirt and turns like a top and lies down.
But let’s keep to the bigger picture, to the sipping and swiping and the stone the father heaves and at last to the father on the hood of his car, his beautiful car, at last to the father on the roof of his car, Bluetooth and drop-down screens and, my God, the chrome, the leather, but what passes now through the vast mind of the bear we will never know.
Pity, disgust, despair?
A bush of ripened berries? A juicy beetle? Bees?
We can’t know—what a shame, we would like to.
Happily our story stops here. The bear takes a last swipe across the hood of the car and leaves a mark in the luminous pearl they will decode the miles home to Ohio. The mark is a bigger version of the mark on the littler boy’s ribs.
The father takes it to mean: buckle down. He quits carousing. He finds a job he can stand not to hate every day and loves his boys like a crazy man he never was before.
NOW, the day shouts. BE SOMETHING.
Be free, one boy thinks, in a flap tent. Be a bird in an eaten tree.
He plans to fell his first goat with a bow he carved and pack the meat out in a rucksack in bloody, cooling slabs. Forage for parsnips and mushrooms. For luck, he will carry that button. For love, he relies on a chickadee who lights on his steady hand.
For now, he’s still under that Escalade his father is pounding on.
His poor father has yanked his shirt off and he is flapping it like a rodeo clown, oblivious at last to his beautiful car and his ugly patchy blubbery gut—it’s alarming, but that’s the idea. He has bloodied his nose with a button. He is shrieking like a peacock and sobbing and clutching himself in the chin.
The bear rears up and walks into the shade like a man he never hopes to be, and a woman claps, uncertain—applause—no lonelier sound in the world.
My heart, my heart, the father sobs, and the sobbing sounds like choking, which it sort of is.
In a minute every tonto watching will hurry off not to miss the nightly feature, happy hour, buffalo tongue, lucky us, we can eat them again, snatched from the brink of extinction. Yippee.
PEMMICAN
Verona was a woman whose tombstone would read: I asked little.
SHE HAD A boy named Little Five Points and Little Five Points wanted a mouse.
The rig cost her sixty-three dollars. Sawdust. Wheel. Glass house. Food. Little Five Points wanted all of it.
His first mouse, he named Verona. All night of both long nights she lived, Verona sprinted without the least complaint on her squeaking wheel. She was a plain mouse, and seemed to know it. Little Five Points made a brown house for her with a curtain of pleasing beads. They passed the hours happily, small boy, plain mouse, until the third night, when death took her. Nobody up to now knows why.
NEXT CAME BASKET and Macaroni, nothing but trouble with these two. These were fancy pants and iconoclasts, spotted from tip to toe. The clerk handed them off in a paper sack. He had a mirror glued to the top of his shoe to look up ladies’ skirts with.
“Hurry home,” he suggested, and they did.
THIS GOES BADLY. Fast.
They are driving. Little Five Points holds his paper sack dutifully between his knees. The stinkers eat through the sack. They make off with his stiffened French fries and his pemmican and his goo. They live a life of furry princes in the tunnels and vents of Verona’s car and trot up her skirts while she drives.
SHE DRIVES INTO a moose, numero uno.
NUMERO DOS: SHE drives into a drunken bear.
VERONA BUYS THREE more mice for her boy. She thinks maybe the problem is numbers. She carries them home in their glass house. Surprise! Little Five Points picks out the prettiest to pet. The mouse nips him and Little Five Points whacks it against the wall. It dies instantly, what a relief.
HE NEVER DOES name the others: they fall to eating each other before he names them and Verona walks what is left of them into the snow by their wrinkling tails.
It could be worse, Verona reminds herself. They could be thriving in her car with Basket and that patchy Macaroni, eating the stiffened French fries Little Five Points forgets from his box.
SHE SETS TRAPS for them. Sympathetic traps with a dollop of peanut butter inside. The car smells of pee and poopy dots. The trap doors swing shut but she finds nothing, not even a smidgen of peanut butter, not even a slick where the dollop sat.
POOR VERONA. LITTLE Five Points wants more mice. Verona has lied to him about all of them, about Verona and the nameless cannibals and almost catching Basket. “They got out,” Verona tells him. “They went to live with the hair and the corn cobs and their little
wild sisters in the walls.”
LITTLE FIVE POINTS wants an ant farm. He wants to watch the red ants steal the black ants’ babies and make the black babies slaves.
Little Five Points wants a boa constrictor.
He wants a baby reindeer.
Little Five Points wants a Gila monster.
Verona says, “Whoa.”
Boa constrictor, Verona thinks. Maybe she can rent one?
SCENARIO NUMERO TRES.
Verona rents a cat from the shelter and turns it loose in her car. The cat howls all night and shreds the seats and snags its teeth in her forehead before bounding off through the snow. She comes into the kitchen bloodied. Little Five Points is spelling his name out with ketchup in his scrambled eggs.
He says, “F-I-V-E. Something red is on you.”
VERONA PACKS THEM off to work, to school. She tries to reason with the mice while driving: the bitterness of winter nights, Little Five Point’s happiness, the yellow wheel, etcetera. The mice sit on the cushy headrest, enlivened by heat and conversation, nibbling at their fries.
SHE CAN’T BRING herself to drive, scenario numero cuatro. She’s afraid to even step near her car. She gets fired from her job for not doing it. The bank repos their house. They have to live in her car. The mice gnaw them to the bone, etcetera, and plump their nests with Little Five Point’s lovely spun-gold hair.
NUMERO CINCO. SHE quits driving: the mice need heat from the engine to live. Ha. The stinkers freeze solid as wood frogs. Verona burns up seven tanks of gas, elated, spring at last, blasting heat through the defrost vent until the mice are crunchy as peanuts.
SEIS. THE FUCKERS prosper. Multiply. The babies spit out babies in the space of a week, mother of God, think of that, translucent pink collapsible sacks that clog the tubes, the tailpipe, an exponential increase, victors of the universe, Verona’s car a mouse farm, should have made it Lucite, it’s hopeless to resist them, savvy and hard at it like on the ant farms Little Five Points admires so in school.
LITTLE FIVE POINT’S papa comes back to them and kisses Verona on her seeping wound and loves her slow until sunup and brings her scrambled eggs in bed. He doesn’t know what he was thinking to think he could live without her. He doesn’t exist without her. Tell me what you want, my life.
Scenario numero siete.
“MATA! MATA!” VERONA shrieks, swinging her arms and dreaming.
They’ll haul her off if she’s not careful. She finds poopy dots in her toothbrush, poopy dots in her hair. Mice are all over her dreams.
“Mata! Mata!”
VERONA IS NO natural mother. The mice are one way she knows.
She tries a neck-snapping trap Little Five Points finds. He finds his mouse in her trap. She is never ever forgiven. He runs away at the age of six and passes his days in hiding in some ghastly European country: scenario numero ocho.
THIS HAS GONE on much too long.
Verona resorts to poison. They’ll blow up slow with their tongues hung out. Ha, she thinks. But she can’t do it. Verona thinks of the handsome Indian man who gave a talk in the town park once who said the white man ought to ask of the animal, “What do you know?”
He told a story of a mouse who saved a small boy from a buffalo stampede. Of dogs who sniff out your heart attack and whimper when your insulin spikes.
VERONA SHUTS THE door. The mice are convened on the dashboard in the numinous green of the speedometer light.
“What do you know?” Verona asks them.
“You have seven lives,” Macaroni tells her, “and you already used up six.”
“Your ex will never come back to you,” Basket says. “Little Five Points will join the army and marry a dowdy Kraut.”
“To get away from you, the little shit.”
“She will plump him up and his hair will fall out and he will never remember your birthday, not one stinking time.”
“Not one?” Verona wonders.
“She’ll ruin everything.”
“She’ll vote for the wrong president. She’ll sigh and roll her eyes.”
Verona picks at a scab.
“A real hatchet,” Basket says. “She’ll hate children.”
“She already hates them now.”
“She knocks them on their heads off the monkey bars.”
“She yanks downs their skirts in the lunch room when their trays are heaped with food.”
Verona jerks her scab free and winces.
“Can we have that?” Basket says.
“Tell me one thing more.”
“Deal,” say the mice, excited.
Their whiskers quiver. Their mouths are wet.
“Soon, you’ll write a story about us. You will hit a deer on a bicycle, thinking of how to be funny. Skip it, is our advice. You will be a teensy bit funny, but only when you think to say ‘poopy dot.’”
“Poopy dot,” Verona says.
“Very funny,” say the mice, and squeeze two neat seeds onto the dashboard.
VERONA WRITES A story about a race of mice who grow themselves from seed, a tiny whole mouse in every stool they put out. The white mice steal the black mouse babies and train them to clean up carefully the wreck the white mice make of the world. They are friendly and obedient. They eat plutonium and plastic. That raft of garbage bigger than Texas that is floating around in the ocean? The mice nibble through that in days.
It is a children’s book and grownups love it. The book sells wildly. Verona is stinking rich. She gives every nickel away.
She runs an ad for a Handsome Indian who replies pronto and falls in love with her. He makes a terrific daddy. Little Five Points learns to catch after all. He wrestles and grunts in the green grass and ties his shoes before school.
This can’t last.
VERONA IS ON her last life: Basket and Macaroni were right. She picks a good day to die and dies happy, a saint almost, radiant and deranged, recalling the masses she raised up from nothing to make this a better world.
COURTSHIP
He was old enough to own things. A Porsche. A boat. A biplane. The other men she knew were boys. She was weeding her father’s radishes and singing with the radio when he flew overhead, close enough she felt the plane passing. Climbed up. Stalled and spun and plunged and climbed and flew upside down in the air. Marvelous. What it must feel like. Courtship of the birds. The serial monogamists, the polyandrous and loosely colonial. The lowly piteous squawking grebe sprinting over the water.
SO SAYS THE POSTMISTRESS
“Everything is forever now—” so says the postmistress, and I won’t argue. I walk home to find a hummingbird flown into the shed, thrashing in the dark of the rafters. Our raccoon stumbles into the shadows, fattened on cat food again. Honey-smelling succulent, a nightjar hunkered in the dew. Another day shut down. Blue curtain. Another letter dropped into the clamorous box. Dear Marcus.
ROOSTER POLLARD CRICKET GOOSE
We could do with him what we wanted. The old people left and left Goose here and what they left was ours.
They’d have taken him if they could. They took the glass from in the windows, they took the crib from the bend in the road. Our pa would have to drag a new crib out to keep the corncobs in. They took the cow in the wet field lowing. They took the blind pig beating the barn.
Down from the house where our ma stuck tight it went barn and barn and barn and crib and next the pond-bridge over the pond next the brocade couch in the pond where they had gone and dragged it. They left us the couch and the road paint sure from wherever cheap they had got it. They left the washer machine with its top torn loose down on its side beside the barn.
They took the knobs from the doors and the rods for towels and what bulbs that burned they could reach up to and loose them from their sockets. Anything much they could loose they took and everything they left behind we got to keep between us. I got the doll from the johnnie I saved that simpered when I hit it. I got the trees and the wind in the trees
and the pond with the couch and the muskrat traps and the green gone garish on it. Pa got the horse and the hills.
The horse we found between the barns where it had gone up and over. It had knocked its thick head on the road, Pa said. We were sitting in the truck.
We had checked the coop for chickens. We had seen that the crib was gone.
It went Pa then me then Ma in the truck with the baby asleep on her bosom.
They had hit it with a pipe, Pa said. Else it had gone up and over.
Ma got out like he told her to and went up the hill with the baby. I heard her high shoes on the road when she went and I heard when she stopped and rested.
The horse I heard and would hear again the queer high birdish sound he made, it hung between the barns. He was laid out between the barns.
I got the barn and the hay in the barn and the dust coming slatted through the rafters. I got the beat pail for corn I beat to spook the rats from the crib when I fed when I came from the bus from school. It was my job to feed the animals, to fatten cow Maggie to eat. I got the hay and the smell of the hay and the light snapping on on the barn.
The horse was Pa’s and the hills he rode and the bees he dug that clouded him when he dragged the hooked plow with the tractor. The rabbits he dug he gave to me I kept in the bowl in the washer machine thrown out where the creek ran through.
I stretched the come-along out like he told me. Because the others never did have a come-along to crank the horse over the gravel with to take him off on whatever it was they had brought to move away on. So they left him laid out on the hump of our road between the high walls of our barns.
The horse was dead, Pa said, or good as dead but what was the thin long sound he made what were the lifting moons of his eyes when Pa came close with his gun? So he was good yet good for something.
A horse is worth something, easy, Pa said, you could sell him off handsome on the hoof in a blink they would buy him from Pa by the pound. We could haul him up on the bed of Pa’s truck sell him off quick down the hill from us to pay for what they loosed from us the hooks and bulbs and sockets. And yet I thought to ride him. Yes. I thought to him: Hup ho.
