by Roger Wall
“You have to catch it!” I shouted over the sound of my paddle sloshing water.
“What, com?! What am I going to catch?!” the stranger screamed, even though we were close enough to hear each other easily.
He was pushing through water toward me. Water was up to his thighs. Another step would bring it up to his hips, then he’d have to swim. That would be to my advantage: a canoe is faster than a swimmer. And I could always strike him in the hands or head as I paddled.
“I just used up my last bit of strength getting here! And that store is empty!”
His voice had degenerated into a high-pitched whine, a tone as ugly as his face.
Suddenly, he was thrashing, struggling to find footing. He must’ve stepped into a hole. He burst up from the water and gasped for air.
“Hydraulic son of a bitch! You want to kill me?” he screamed. “I don’t know how to swim!”
I should have paddled away at that point and been done with him, but I enjoyed watching his torment. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because his size and ugliness, the coarse way he moved, and his high-pitched voice and odd words made him seem to be a different species from Otis and me. His lack of cleverness meant that I could always outsmart him and get away, if I needed to. So I continued to watch him.
The stranger seemed to give up. He staggered back to shore and picked up his shoes and began throwing them into the mud, first one, then the other, retrieved them and then threw them down again, uttering as they smacked the wet silt: “Mother shit. Father shit. Goddamn family shit.” Then he laced them up and squished up the flats toward the campground and the empty, collapsing store.
I began to laugh at his confusion. He was lost, wandering from somewhere to someplace else, alone as he cursed his mother and father.
The stranger reminded me of my own hunger, and this stopped me from sweeping the paddle through the water and turning away from shore. My diet of fish and vegetables hadn’t been very filling, or satisfying, and I was growing tired of the measly walleye I had been catching. After the poor experience with the gopher, I hadn’t set any snares and had been too impatient to attempt netting a goose. The size of the stranger would be an advantage in capturing one, if I could lure him back to the playing field. And perhaps he’d passed other towns with people in them, places where I could search for my parents.
Of course, I didn’t let the stranger enter the canoe; I kept him a safe distance from me.
“Hey!” I yelled. “We could catch a goose!”
The stranger turned.
“What?” he said.
“We could catch a goose. Cook it.”
“What’s a goose?”
“A big bird. Like a duck.”
“Like a chicken? Like on National Tranquility Day?”
Otis had never told me about National Tranquility Day, but I didn’t want the stranger to know this.
“Yeah, like a chicken,” I said.
“Okay,” the stranger said and walked down the silt flat toward me.
“We have to go up the bay and the river a little ways to where the geese live. It’s not far. You can walk. There’s no room in the canoe.” I pointed to the sail and mast, stored in the front of the boat.
“I wouldn’t get in that shaky thing even if there was room.”
The stranger walked on the firm silt, well above the waterline, and could easily match the speed of the canoe. In fact, I found I had to paddle fast to keep up with him. I tried not to show that this was an effort and hoped he couldn’t hear my rapid breathing.
Once we reached the river and started upstream, the stranger crossed the silt beaches and grassy banks without complaining. The distance didn’t seem to tire him. Perhaps the promise of a goose calmed him. We didn’t speak.
Before I had started my forays downriver, I had thought that our town was a long way from Lake Sakakawea. It wasn’t, actually. It was situated along the wider, deeper section of White Earth River just a few long bends from the bay.
When we arrived at the playing field, I tied the canoe to the dock and stayed there, still preserving a distance between the stranger and me in case I needed to escape.
“Where’re the geese, com?” the stranger asked.
“There,” I pointed, “up in the playing field, in the grass. Listen,” I said.
You could hear them moving about, pecking at the ground for seeds, insects, grass.
“Okay, traction. But how do we catch them?”
“You have to tackle them. I’ll flush them toward you, you grab the fattest one you see.”
“They’re much bigger than the chickens we eat. More like little kids.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Like children. I catch them all the time.”
“By yourself?”
“I used to do it with my grandfather.”
“Traction.”
I didn’t offer the stranger use of the net with the sinkers tied along the edges, which is what I used to net a goose. I wanted to test his skill at hunting. If I were going to attempt trapping a deer with him, I wanted to be sure it wouldn’t be a waste of energy, which would leave two hungry people to feed with only the vegetables from the garden.
As it turned out, the stranger didn’t wait for me to herd the geese toward him; he set off alone in a sprint across the field, his arms wide, his body low to the ground. His attempts were so funny that laughter prevented me from leaving the dock. I was doubled over. His antics were better than any tale Otis had acted out.
He quickly came to appreciate that his best chance lay in separating a goose from the flock, but his timing was off. Whenever he dove toward the bird, it easily eluded him with a quick burst of flapping and its own sprint into taller grass. The stranger would hit the ground with a “thump” before rising up to swear in a way I’d never heard before: “Hydraulic son of a bitch!”
I didn’t think he’d be able to catch one, and his show of diving into the grass made me not care. Why was this so funny? I don’t know. Perhaps it reminded me of playing soccer with Otis, chasing the ball, kicking it, his bouncing it off his head, our shouts and laughter, one of the few times it seemed that there were more people than just Otis and me in White Earth River.
But suddenly the game ended. The stranger caught a goose, a lone, midsize one, a year or two old. He was hugging it against his chest, trying to subdue it. One wing dangled limply, misshapen, perhaps broken from the struggle. It was still alive, and angry. Its long neck twisted and turned wildly so it could peck the stranger’s arms and face. I ran as fast as I could. I knew he wouldn’t be able to hold it for very long.
The stranger was leaning backward, turning his head away from the goose, which had began to squawk. The stranger seemed to be squeezing it tighter and tighter in an attempt to kill it.
I grabbed the goose’s neck with both hands and gave it a sharp snap and then pulled the bird to the ground and severed its neck with my knife. The stranger jumped back as blood oozed from the stump.
“Oh, you little ragamuffin bastard! You just cut its fucking head off! Brutal, com, brutal!”
He shook his hands as though he had slaughtered the goose and was ridding them of blood.
I held the bird until it was still.
“You have to kill him right away, not let him suffer.”
“I don’t know about killing a geese.”
“Goose.”
I looked up at the stranger. His eyes were light brown, greenish, not black like Otis’s or mine. A blank expression hung on his bumpy face, which was now covered in welts. His slack jaw blended into his neck. Although he was tall, he wasn’t old, perhaps only a little older than I was.
The smell of blood, intestines, and flesh as I cut the goose open made my stomach rumble with hunger. I imagined the taste of the meat, hot and oily and gamey.
“Gather some wood,” I ordered. I scooped heart, lung, and bowels from the bird’s cavity and then wiped my hands on the grass.
“What’s that, gather wood?”
“From the trees, twigs and branches, the dry ones. Pick them off the ground.”
The stranger looked at me dumbly.
“All right, follow me,” I said.
I was afraid to leave the goose, in case a coyote or fisher was watching, so I carried it. The feathers still needed to be plucked.
“That thing is still bleeding,” the stranger said.
“It’ll stop,” I said.
“I mean, I was just walking down the road, you know, looking for something to eat.”
“Me, too.”
“Then we’re on the same team, right?”
“We’re not playing soccer.”
“What’s that?”
“A game. Teams play it.”
“Like Hug the Tree?”
“What’s Hug the Tree?”
“Fathers and sons play it after dinner, in the woods, when everyone’s drunk. If you catch a father, you get to beat him. If a father catches you, he gets to beat you. Hug the Tree.”
“Soccer’s not like that. You play it with a ball. You kick it and try to score goals.”
Otis and I had played soccer until the ball went flat. He had never talked about the sports that people on the preserves or in the Center played, because he didn’t know about them, but it didn’t surprise me that the stranger would play the type of game he described. He’d probably been caught many times by the fathers and most of the beatings he’d suffered had probably been to his head.
A round rod of metal fit into a slot in my knife sheath, and if I struck the rough metal at the right angle, it generated a spark. This I did, squatting over the fire ring. A pile of dry grass began to smoke. I lowered my face toward the grass and blew long and steady. The grass glowed, and the kindling caught and crackled.
“Voom, then there’s fire!” the stranger said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. First it’s the bird, now this. You look like you do it all the time, com.”
“Pretty often,” I said, rising up.
The stranger kneeled down beside the fire ring. “We have a stove at home. Electric. We use it to boil water for packages.”
Packages. We had found a few of those in the ruins. I plucked the goose. The feathers and down would add another layer to the pillow I had started before Otis had died.
“This place is kind of run down, you know,” the stranger said, looking around. “That table over there? It’s missing some boards, and all the shit.”
I ignored the nervous way he spoke and thought about how the goose wasn’t large, not a mature adult, the ones I preferred to cull from the flock, and that I deserved a larger portion because I had killed and cooked it.
“I’ve seen ’em fly overhead before, honking. Your parents know you kill ’em?” the stranger asked.
“They don’t know what I do,” I said, which, of course, was true.
“Yeah, mine don’t either. Not any more. After I grabbed a bunch of MRGs and jumped on my bike.”
“You rode to the lake?” I looked at his face.
“Yeah. Almost.” He smiled. “I was fed up with the quarry. Just pedaled away. No one came after me.”
“Where’s your bike?” I asked. Otis had hoped to find one in the ruins but never did.
“Busted. In a ditch somewhere. I crashed.”
The stranger began rocking back and forth on his heels. His knee was swollen. The skin around a large scab was red, probably infected.
“Oh. Did you meet anyone on the road named Pérez?”
“Pérez? No. No Pérezes. Nobody at all. Everything’s deserted. Why?”
“That’s my father.”
“He doesn’t live here?”
“No, just me.”
“Alone?”
“My grandfather used to be here, but he died.”
“Then you’re alone.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re alone. I’m alone. We’re the same.”
“A little, maybe.”
I skinned four willow branches on which to skewer the goose.
“Then we don’t have to share the bird with your parents or your grandfather.”
“No.”
“You really know how to use that thing.” He pointed to my knife. “Where’d you get it?”
“My grandfather.”
“I had grandparents, too. They died a long time ago, I think. My dad said that they weren’t useful. My mom won’t talk about it.”
“Were they relocated or killed?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Killed, probably,” the stranger said.
“That’s what usually happens.”
“Yeah.”
I stirred the coals and lowered the rusty grill, spacing the halves of the goose equally over the heat. I brushed some goose scat out of the way and sat in the grass with my legs to the side. The stranger rocked off his knees to sit beside me.
“How’s my face look, is it really bad?” He touched the goose welts, the white-tipped bumps, his scraped nose, and the beginnings of a beard.
“Pretty bad,” I told him.
“Damn, that bird. My bike crash, too. And I haven’t shaved since I left.”
“You smell like the geese.”
“Their shit. I know. It’s on my shoes.”
“On your shirt, too.”
I felt the stranger study me and looked straight ahead, toward the fire, to avoid his stare.
“And your shorts are kind of dirty. And torn up, too,” he pointed at me.
I had found the pants in a demolished closet, not on a skeleton, and had cut off the legs below the knee. They hung loosely, held up with the deer hide belt on which I carried my knife.
“They’re okay,” I said.
“And those shoes. I’ve never seen any like them.”
“My grandfather made them.” I wanted to recount how the garden cart tire had gone flat, how we had tanned the hide but stopped myself, afraid of revealing too much about my life.
“He must’ve been clever. My uncle’s clever. He lives in the Center. He said he’d get me a job there. At the cathedral, maybe.”
“That’s a type of preserve?” I ventured. Otis had told me about the office towers he’d helped build but was ignorant of the final form the Center had taken. I moved the pieces of goose so the flames from the fat didn’t singe the skin too much.
“Some kind of monument. Like a park. People visit it for fun. To sit inside and be quiet. Its walls need tons of pink granite. What we mined in the quarry. I’m a mason. Finishing team. Want to see my tools?”
The stranger pulled two hammers from his pack. One had a pick on its end and the other had a wide, flat blade. A bright loop of red cord ran through their yellow plastic handles.
I gently swung the one with the pick. It was well balanced, of good workmanship. I imagined the damage the pick could do: pierce a hand, lodge between a rib, split open a skull. It would have been easy for me to turn on him and wound him, maybe kill him, with one strike, or for him to do the same to me. But we were getting along; we were sharing a goose; he seemed okay, if odd. I handed him the tools, unafraid that he’d suddenly attack me, and he began rhythmically planting them in the grass. I almost asked if he wanted to whittle with my knife.
“When I get to the Center, I’ll have to sneak in, probably at night. Then I’ll find my uncle,” he said.
“You’ll be detected.”
“There might be a small problem. Usually, transfers are arranged beforehand, true, but my uncle can probably smooth things out. You could come with me. Look for that guy, Perrr . . .”
“Pérez.”
“Yeah, Pérez.”
“My father.”
“Yeah, your father. He might be in the Center.”
“I don’t know. I don’t like agents.”
“Yeah, I don’t either. But if your father’s there, it won’t matter.”
I checked the temperature of the goose by sticking the point of my knife into its flesh. The spurt of juice made my mouth water. It was done. I
handed the stranger the skewers with the smaller half of the goose.
“I wish my mom could see me now.” A chirp, an aborted laugh, gurgled up through his throat. “Eating a bird and it’s not even National Tranquility Day. You have a knife and fork? I know how to use them.”
“No,” I lied, even though we had several in the cave.
I crunched the small bones of the breast and sucked the marrow out of the thigh and waited for the stranger to notice that he had less food than I did. He seemed not to understand that he had been cheated and left ample meat on the bones, which I asked to eat.
“Yeah, if you want. I don’t eat the bones, and this bird didn’t taste that good. Kind of tough and stringy. But I’m still hungry. I could eat another, I guess. If you’ll cook it, I’ll catch it.”
“Not so soon, they’re still upset.”
“Then you have something else to eat?”
“We could fish later.” I wasn’t about to mention the garden.
“What about some MRGs?”
MRGs, what was he talking about?
“No, there aren’t any” seemed a safe response.
I placed the fat-coated sticks on the fire so they would flare up.
“Well, I guess I can wait until dinner. The clinic says I need about 5,000 calories a day. And I’m depleted. I don’t need a test to tell me that.”
The stranger sighed, pried off his sneakers, and then lay on his back, stretching to his full length. He wiggled his toes, flexed his ankles, and laced his fingers beneath his head as though he were going to take a nap.
Although we were getting along, seeing him relax infuriated me. Did he think he could stay in White Earth River without my asking him to? That I would feed him and offer him shelter on my land? What right did he have even to be here? I looked at his bright, shiny red shorts and white T-shirt with the number seven on the front, stained from sweat and grass and smeared with goose shit. I smelled his rotten odor, worse than the smell of shit. I imagined him a huge, oddly proportioned carcass, dead on the ground, ready to be gutted.
I stirred the coals so the fire would burn itself out and then stood up. “I need to go. I have work to do.”
“Wait, I’ll help you. I’m a good worker, strong as a machine.”
