by Roger Wall
I shook a limb in anger. Of course I knew that fruit ripened once a season, but Otis had never talked about the apples’ growing time, only his fear of encountering government agents. It was stupid of me not to have figured this out, one more thing that I didn’t understand or couldn’t remember.
I retraced my steps through the trampled grass, brushing up against the sharp spines of thistle, and passing dense rows of junipers that appeared in odd locations, as though they had once marked something that no longer existed, a roadway or path, perhaps. There were plenty of young milkweed buds to pick; at least these could add variety to my usual diet of corn, although they weren’t sweet like an apple.
As I walked down the valley from the abandoned orchard, I saw the ruins of the town ahead, blurry in the midday heat. The cottonwoods and elms lining the road almost hid the demolished prefabs, and if I concentrated on the road, the river, the fields of grass along the floodplain, and the buttes framing the valley, I could pretend that someone at the end of the road would greet me and offer shelter.
Between the trees off to the right of the road, sunlight reflected off the metal roof of the monorail platform. Three idle silver cars rested on the track as though ready to take on passengers. A few times Otis and I had waited out afternoon storms under the protection of the metal roof as a torrent of hail drummed above. The machine operators who had knocked down the town had ignored the train cars and station—the concrete and steel would have required too much bashing and slamming to destroy, I suppose.
On the platform I peered through the window of the middle train car. Red seats brighter than any flower lined the walls, just below the windows, and tile the color of young sheaves of corn covered the floor. The door would not budge. Otis had never been very curious about the train. He worried that if we broke in, the town’s power supply would magically switch on and we’d be whisked away to the Center for processing. I didn’t share his fear. I wanted to sit on one of the red seats. I hoped the train car would take me somewhere.
I swung the ax at the door as though I were rescuing people trapped inside. I split the rubber gasket down the middle and smashed the mechanism that had kept the door locked for seventeen years. The door’s two panels separated and rolled apart easily, with barely a nudge, as though they were welcoming me inside. The interior of the car smelled of heat and something else, perhaps the odor of the last passengers or the plastic of the red seats. I settled into their soft foam. The aluminum shell cracked with the exit of baked air, and sun shined through the windows. My head became heavy. I stretched out along the bench of seats, my nose pressed into the red foam, and inhaled the scent of the last person to sit there. Then I fell asleep.
I awoke chilled at twilight and returned to the garden. I picked a few leaves of lettuce and chewed a handful of sunflower seeds as the Big Dipper brightened, then collected my belongings and returned to the monorail car. On the green floor I spread the deerskin and cotton blanket; on the red seat I set my pack. Before lying down, I closed the door as though I were saying goodnight to my neighbors and shutting out the primitive world of spirits in which Otis roamed.
In the morning, light filled the car. Unlike in the cave, there were no corners of darkness. My shoulders and hips ached from the hard floor, so after tea I cut sod for a bed. It would dry quickly in the day’s heat, as would the handfuls of grass I spread to add another layer of softness.
As I closed the door to my new dwelling to start the day’s work in the garden, I said: “I live in a silver home above ground. It has windows and a door that opens and closes. I will never sleep in the earth again.”
I became sick of the sound of my voice. The wordless singing, the monotonous humming, the jabbering to myself—a poor substitute for speaking to another person. I started to drum, instead.
With two cottonwood sticks the length of my forearm, I pounded on any hard surface available: the shiny side of the monorail car; the tree stump mortar in which I ground corn; the bench in the cottonwood grove; the plastic bucket in which I hauled foul-tasting water from the well; and the thick table under the pavilion where town residents, perhaps my parents, had once picnicked. This was my favorite spot because the pavilion’s wooden roof and location on a rise trapped and amplified my singular drumming so it sounded as loud as a drum circle—what Otis had said was once a feature of the pow wows that he and Sammy had organized—and I imagined my father here, drumming beside me.
I was not silent as I pounded out a rhythm. The rapid beat of the sticks stretched my voice to new levels as I made up songs: shouts of descriptions of whatever activity I was about to do, was doing, or had done in the moments before, with the last syllable of a mournful moan held until my voice broke. I yelled, too, bringing up deep guttural sounds, as I had taught myself to do in the cave, until my throat hurt and my chest was coated in sweat.
One afternoon under the picnic pavilion, while drinking water from a leaky plastic bottle, I decided I would look for my parents. I would take a canoe and paddle downriver and out into the lake. I would sail up lake and down lake and scout the shore for other towns. If Otis and I had survived here in White Earth River, my parents may have survived in another town along a tributary or the lake itself, where there was arable land, fish to catch, animals to trap. Our survival proved that it was possible for other people to survive, too. Perhaps they had banded together with other overlooked people.
I beat the picnic table with my sticks, denting the wooden surface. When I finished, my hands sore from gripping the sticks, I looked across the river at the geese nesting on Goose Peninsula. They seemed not to have paid any attention to me. My music could not interrupt their eating and shitting.
“We could use them to fish.” I had tried to sound practical the first time I had asked Otis about taking a canoe out on the river, but really I had wanted to know how it felt to float downstream like a branch. “What if we capsize? We’d drown,” Otis had answered. “The boats will protect us,” I had countered. Otis had laughed: “Just because you’re on the surface doesn’t mean you’re safe.”
Otis was afraid of the river because he had never learned to swim. I discovered this one evening when I waded too far into the channel of the river and slipped beneath the surface. Otis made no effort to rescue me and stayed in the ankle-deep water near shore. That was my first swimming lesson: flailing my arms and kicking my feet to regain contact with the bottom. Later, I taught myself to dog paddle across the deep pools of the river; then I started to read one of the “Safe Boating” pamphlets I had found in a desk drawer in the boathouse.
The metal door to the boathouse rattled as I raised it. Sunlight washed over the mast, boom, rudder, and leeboards, which were spread over the floor where I had left them. I hadn’t sailed the canoe since that day when I had showed Otis his grave. Outside the back door of the boathouse, on the ramp that angled down to the dock, a warm breeze rose off the White Earth River. Water lapped against the rotting boathouse pilings.
My favorite canoe, the sleek red one, was resting on a rack inside the boathouse. I wrestled it off the cradle and dragged it down the shaky ramp. I selected a life preserver and threaded my arms through the openings and buckled it, as the children in the “Safe Boating” pamphlet did. Three bulky rowboats filled with water were resting on the bottom of the river near the dock. Bailing one out would have taken all day, and they looked so fat and slow. I gathered up a paddle and the rigging.
The current led me south past Goose Peninsula and then around gentle bends until the river straightened and widened into the open water of White Earth Bay, where the wind picked up. For a moment I drifted, letting the wind push the canoe broadside while I secured the mast and stowed the paddle. I recalled the sequence of getting underway: drop the leeboards and rudder, tug on the halyard line and tie it to the cleat, push the boom aside. The triangle of white nylon filled with wind. I was headed out on what the “Safe Boating” booklet described as “a port tack with a close-hauled sail.” At least the d
irection of the wind and the angle of the canoe in relation to it seemed roughly to match one of the illustrations. There were other words in the booklet that had sounded odd to me at first, too—beating, running, tacking, coming about—but soon I learned their meaning.
After a few tacks, I was approaching the point of land where the bay met the lake, a short peninsula. If I were wandering or searching for others, this would be a place to rest, spend a night, and wait.
What I found surprised me: a small wooden structure at the head of a clearing dotted with iron circles, fire pits, some of which still had the remains of burnt wood. The structure’s slats were falling off and its roof was sagging; it was unsafe to enter. A sign beside the crooked doorway said, “White Earth Store and Campground. Register here.” The store’s worn and faded sign indicated that the store had been abandoned long ago. I was sure all its food had been looted. Nonetheless, the remains of campfires and a gravel road leading away from the campground made me believe that people had stayed here. White Earth River seemed suddenly not to be so remote and isolated.
It didn’t seem safe to explore up the gravel road. It would be better to watch the road from the lake, in case a group of people was traveling along the road. I wanted only to question one person at a time about my parents. That would be wisest. I pushed the canoe through the silt until it floated free.
With the buttes no longer breaking the wind’s force, I could feel the thin plastic skin of the canoe straining against the water as the sail filled and tightened. I leaned against the gunwale to balance the boat and pressed the tiller toward the water. This was the first time I had sailed beyond the mouth of the bay. I tried to stay near the shore to keep an eye on the road leading to the campground, but after a few hundred meters, an inlet appeared: a marsh of thick reeds waded into the water, fields of grasses and flowers dropped off to a border of driftwood and rocks and silt, and narrow stands of alluvial trees marched up the side of a butte. The land looked continuous and wild, as though it had always been that way and I was the first to see it. There was no sign of the road or another town.
The wind carried me into the middle of the lake. I was afraid to fight it, to try to come about and steer the boat back to shore. Soon I was as far from one shore as another, both blurry in the distance. I felt locked in the water, the sail tight. Moments passed—how many I’m not sure. I hung onto the tiller. The risk of swamping and capsizing edged into my mind, and I tried not to think about how quickly I had left the shore behind.
My mind began to empty out. Water rushed along the sides of the canoe and sprayed my hands, my face. I started to enjoy the tension between water and wind and sail. It was as though I weren’t alone. Then I glanced over my shoulder, curious about how far I had come. This was a mistake: it broke the trance. The shore was a haze; I couldn’t see the entrance to the bay; and fear of not returning spilled over me. In a panic I pulled in the sail to come about. The sail flapped violently, the mainsheet dug into my hand, and chop hit the stalled canoe. Sour fluid rose into my mouth. I spit into the lake and pushed aside the boom, let out the sail, and ran toward shore.
I dropped the sail and drifted. The air had chilled me, my fingers were numb from clutching the mainsheet, and the muscles in my arms, the first time they had been tensed in this way, shook. I held onto the gunwales for balance and tried to understand what I had experienced. Something in the lake, in the movement of the canoe through the water, had spoken to me, but I didn’t know what this force was trying to say to me. I wondered if I was on the verge of having a vision.
After that day, I sailed down lake every afternoon. At first I looked for towns. When I didn’t find any, I searched for the feeling I had experienced on the first day. It eluded me. I returned to the dock exhausted and burned from the sun and wind and craving food and water. I tried to remember the connection between water, wind, and sail. When these elements had lined up, it was like the first bite of deer meat. Not sweet or sour or bitter or hot, but of the deer, what the deer was willing to give up, leave behind.
PART III:
THE STRANGER
I heard the sound as I approached the peninsula. It had a quality unlike any of the sounds I had become dependent on for company: wind rattling the sail, water rushing along the hull of the canoe, the snap of rigging against the mast. It was a human sound, a faint singing, and seemed to be coming from the road and drifting over the silt flats and cottonwood saplings and across the water toward me.
The closer I got to shore, the louder and more regular the singing became, with a stop and start rhythm to a peculiar melody. I dropped the sail and drifted and strained to hear the tune: lines slightly echoing, rhyming, and rising like a question. I bobbed my head as a voice sang:
I don’t know but I’ve been told
Working in a quarry gets mighty old.
I don’t know but it’s been said
Bust your ass and end up dead.
Cruising along and making time
Wind at my back and feeling fine.
Tire blew out and lost control
Hit the brakes but started to roll.
Cut and scraped and bleeding, too,
But sucked it up and tied my shoe.
Started to walk and felt the pain
Cried for Momma and prayed for rain.
No one here in this goddamn place
Looks to me like the end of the race.
Stomach churning, starting to yell
Soon I’ll die and rot in hell.
The words were English, the song unlike anything Otis had ever sung. I looked toward the clearing above the silt flats and saw a huge man standing in the middle of the campground. I froze in place, both hands on the gunwales to steady myself. An agent, surely. But he wasn’t wearing the gray suit that Otis had told me that agents wear. Nor was he carrying a gun. And he continued to sing as he walked in a circle around the campground. A government man wouldn’t sing to himself as he carried out the work of rounding up or killing people, I thought. Nor would he walk around in shorts and no shirt, showing off his hairy chest. Even before the town emptied out and was destroyed, we didn’t have many neighbors; a few farms, maybe some distant towns—ours was not a populous region, Otis used to say. Perhaps he was from one of those places, left behind and now coming out from hiding. Perhaps he had encountered my parents.
The stranger dropped his small pack and walked onto the silt flats, where he kneeled and washed his face and drank several handfuls of the chalky water—not a good health practice, and proof that he wasn’t from an abandoned farm. A farmer would know better. When he stood up, he brought his hands level to his forehead as though to scout the lake. I wasn’t far offshore; I’m sure the stranger must’ve seen me immediately. Yet, at first he didn’t react. Perhaps he wasn’t expecting to see another person, and I felt unsure about whether I wanted to be seen.
“Hey!” the stranger shouted. “You!”
This voice was louder than the one he used to sing and had a shrill ring to it.
“Hey, you, I need some help!”
I didn’t believe him. He didn’t seem to be hurt, and his size was threatening. Perhaps he was trying to fool me, lure me ashore for an attack. Despite the danger, I wanted to see what this giant of a man looked like up close. I lowered the sail and paddled slowly toward shore, careful not to run aground in the thick silt of the shallows. I drew figure eights with the paddle to keep the canoe from washing onto shore with the wind.
The stranger began lifting one leg at a time as he moved through ankle-deep water toward me in an odd, belabored dance. Suddenly he started shouting:
“Hydraulic mud! Sucking my shoes off my feet! You gotta help me, com! I’m misfiring!”
He sounded like he was going to cry. But I didn’t believe this. I thought he was acting, the way Otis would when he spoke the different voices in The Tale of the Prince Who Was Denied. The silt would swallow my sandals, too, if they weren’t tied on tight.
“You have to dig for t
hem,” I shouted across the water.
“What? My parents?”
“Only if they live at the bottom of the lake. Your shoes, I mean,” I laughed.
The stranger squatted and plunged his hands into the silt, up to his elbows. “Might as well have my hand up my ass,” he said more to himself than to me. He used words that I had never heard before, a secret language of sorts. One by one, he extracted his sneakers. He poured watery silt out of them, rinsed them, and then flung them on the shore. He advanced toward me, swaying from foot to foot, his hands out to his sides for balance, as though he were afraid to step on the muddy bottom. He would capsize the canoe; that would be next, I thought. Then we would be in the water together, fighting. His size and strength would allow him to push me to the bottom and hold me there until I drowned.
“You got any food?” he asked.
“Not here,” I said, gripping the paddle so I could escape or hit him, if he lunged at me.
“What about at home?”
He wiped sweat from his burnt brow and took another step forward.
“No food there, either,” I said.
“Come on, what d’you eat? I haven’t had anything in three days!”
He took another step, and then I saw his face. I had never seen pictures of a person, man or woman, so hideous and couldn’t stop myself from staring at the stranger’s pink, sunburned flesh, his scraggly beard, peeling nose, and the lumpy white pustules disfiguring his skin. Curiosity made me want to paddle closer, but I didn’t. He was already near enough that with a few quick strides he would be at my side. I back-paddled away from him.
