by Roger Wall
The stranger sat up and shoved his blistered feet into his shoes.
“I have to do it by myself.”
“Why? You got a solitary?”
“Yeah.”
The stranger seemed to talk about things that even Otis hadn’t known existed.
“But what about later, com?” His voice tightened and rose in pitch again, in the wounded tone he had spoken in before.
“Aren’t you going to the Center?” I asked.
“I need to build up my stores, com. I’m nearly finished. And that fucking bird was just a snack.”
His eyes were like those of a frightened animal, half-dead in a snare. I didn’t want to be near him. I’d never trap a deer with him, despite his strength. I shouldn’t have fed him, delayed his death.
“Maybe I’ll see you later,” I said and then jogged off into the woods to avoid his catching up with me before I crossed the river and disappeared into the ruins of the town.
I stopped in the garden and at the monorail car to stuff my pack with vegetables and gather the deerskin and bladders of water. As I climbed up Windy Butte, the space the stranger filled in my mind seemed to expand and bump up against the spaces that had contained my life up to this point: Otis’s confession; my parents’ disappearance; my life alone in the cave, garden, and monorail car; my sailing and drumming and search. There didn’t seem to be enough room in my head for everything. The borders stretched and then broke because the area the stranger occupied, like the stranger himself, was larger than everything else.
Outside the cave, alertness, more acute than any I had experienced before, warned me not to step inside the cave. It would have been impossible for the stranger to know its location and to have raced up the butte before me to hide in it, but this is what I feared. I settled onto the sandy ledge outside the cave, my back pressed against the warm sandstone of the butte, and watched over the valley.
What was the stranger doing? Where would he sleep? Was he still hungry? Why did I care? We had shared a meal, that was all, but now I found myself able only to think about him, his bulky size, his high-pitched voice, ugly face, and funny way of talking. Why did I lead him to White Earth River? Otis would never have done this, even to help with trapping game. And, yes, Otis would be mad at me right now. I imagined the stranger becoming tried of waiting for me to return and leaving. Or, if it were true that he hadn’t eaten in three days, maybe he’d wander the empty ruins of the town, unaware of the garden, until he fell down in a thistle-choked street and died.
At dusk I unrolled the deerskin on the sandy ledge outside the cave. The crude map in my mind continued to shift to accommodate this disturbing person. I pulled the drumming sticks from my belt and threw them into the cave. This was not a time to think about singing.
Sometime during the night I crawled under the deerskin and stayed there until the sun was midway toward overhead and the sky was a bright, cloudless blue. The intensity of the heat and the light tormented me. A crust of sand covered my lips, and grit had filled my mouth. The wind had forced grains of sand into every crevice of my body: the split of my buttocks, the moist fold of my groin, the corners of my eyes, the creases alongside my nose. Not even my foreskin escaped the sand, which I discovered when I walked to the far corner of the ledge and pissed an amber stream that burned my penis. Dehydration. The stranger’s presence had upset my routines for eating and drinking and now I was suffering. He had been right, though: half a goose wasn’t much to eat. Otis and I would’ve shared a pot of corn mush, too, and a few stalks of broccoli.
I washed the sand from my face and mouth with handfuls of water. I craved a hot cup of red root tea but was afraid to light a fire, in case the smoke gave away my location. Instead, I sipped water and slowly chewed leaves of curly kale, which was not my favorite kale.
Below me, in the tops of the cottonwoods, birds sang as though nothing were different in the valley: no starving man wandering the streets or waiting to rob me of what little food I carried in my pockets; no bloated corpse lying face down and beginning to rot.
This last thought preoccupied me, and although the stranger was still probably several days away from starvation, I couldn’t rid my mind of an image of him face down on the ground, arms outstretched, and skin tight over his ribs—like the carcass of a pronghorn at the bottom of a cliff, swollen with gas and beginning to decompose.
I remembered my disgust in seeing flies crawl over Otis’s cool, yellow-green face, the stench of his soiled clothing. I wouldn’t bury another body. This time would be different. I’d hack the stranger’s bloated corpse into pieces small enough for coyotes to carry away. Let them gnaw on the bones, shred the muscle, tendons, and vessels. Let the earth absorb his blood until all that remained of him was a stain on the ground.
As I rolled up the deerskin, the stranger’s voice started to play a song in my head, not his words, or the catchy melody he had sung when I found him on the shore, but his tones and inflections, his bellowing and hearty braa’s, gaa’s, coo’s, whaa’s, and his whiny aie’s, eee’s, iii’s. These ricocheted around in my head, bouncing off one side and zapping through to the other. These sounds were worse than the moaning that replayed itself in my head after I’d endured Otis’s attempts at singing his fake Hidatsa songs.
I wanted to scream, long and loud, but was afraid of revealing my location. To rid my head of the stupid noise the stranger’s speech had created, to clear up the confusion I was beginning to feel about whether he would starve or leave, I had to see him and hear his voice—and mine in response to his.
I would bring him clean water and vegetables. We would share another meal. I was ravenous.
Even though the rubber bladders made the well water taste fouler than it already was, I filled two of these and arranged a handful of young carrots and small zucchinis in the bottom of my pack. From the food cache in the garden, I stuffed my pockets with last season’s sunflower seeds. I expected to find the stranger lying on a picnic table in the pavilion, but he wasn’t there. Nor was he wandering through the ruins of the town, walking south or north along the road, or standing under the metal roof of the monorail platform, where I finally rested in the shade. Water had sloshed down my chest, and the rope joining the two bladders had dug into my neck. I was hot and irritable, sorry that I had gone to so much trouble for someone whose presence I resented. Maybe he had gotten tired of waiting for me to show up and left town. Or maybe he suddenly died, I thought. I readjusted the bladders and walked back toward the playing field. Gaa, braa, whaa!
Both doors of the boathouse were now raised, and the stranger was standing on the dock, facing upriver, his shorts down around his thighs. His pelvis was thrust forward as he aimed his long penis so an arc of urine fell into the river.
“There you are, you little ragamuffin son of a bitch!” He pulled up his shorts and bounded up the ramp to the boathouse and slapped me on the shoulder. “I was losing traction last night when you didn’t show up. I thought I’d never see you again. Those blue things. Better than a broken table.” He pointed at the bed of life preservers he had made on the floor.
Usually, the blue vests hung from the rack along the wall, lined up from small to large, with their zippers closed and buckles fastened, and it bothered me that he had rearranged them as if the boathouse were his. I slung the bladders over a peg in the wall and walked out onto the dock to see if the stranger’s urine had changed the color of the water. He watched me from the boathouse, his arms crossed and chest puffed out.
“It’s not good to piss in the river,” I said, looking back at him, standing above me. “We bathe in it, and the fish live there. I’ll show you the pit I squat over in the rubble later on.”
I paused a moment and then recited a lecture that Otis had given me when we were bathing in the river: “The water isn’t safe to drink. It’s okay to wash in because our skin protects us, but never drink it.” I could feel Otis’s patient but stern voice overtaking my own as I spoke. I wasn’t sure if what Otis believed was true. Hi
s fear of the water may have had more to do with his not knowing how to swim.
“Tasted okay to me.” The stranger pouted and put his hands on his hips. “I’ve been drinking it all along.” He had stopped smiling. “Ever since I started down the road to your dead-end shit part of the world.”
“The river looks okay, but it’s filled with chemicals from farming long ago. They’ll make you sick.” I continued Otis’s argument.
The stranger walked the few steps down the ramp and onto the dock and peered into the water, then he stared at me. His eyes seemed darker than they had the day before.
“Why are you stalling out on me, com?” He whined and pointed a finger at me. “I thought we were going to have some fun today but you show up hitting me with don’ts.”
He was taller than me by two heads, and while I was thinking about what to say, he closed in on me, pushing his weight forward and clenching his fists.
“No, this, out here”—I backed up and swept my hand through the air, indicating the river, destroyed town, and Windy Butte—“if you follow certain rules, you can live a long time.” I couldn’t stop myself from stating Otis’s beliefs, but I knew I wasn’t speaking with his authority.
The stranger smiled and leaned toward me. “Don’t worry, little com, I’m just passing through,” he boasted. “I don’t plan on staying here long enough to die. Now what’d you bring me to eat?”
I took a step away from him and took the zucchinis and carrots from my pack.
The stranger bit off the tip of a carrot. “This one tastes like candy.” He twisted off the green feathery leaves and dropped them on the dock.
“It’s carrot. First of the season.” I picked up the leaves. “Don’t you want to eat the tops? That’s where all the vitamins are.”
The stranger tried them, but grimaced. “Not sweet at all, com. You can have them.”
He ate three more carrots while I ate the leaves.
“Carrot, huh. Never heard of it, com. And what’s this green one called?”
“Zucchini.”
The stranger bit off the end and began chewing it.
“Firm, but not as good as carrot.”
He sipped some water from a rubber bladder and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Better than the packaged stuff we usually eat, though,” he said.
“All of our food comes from the garden,” I said. “And gardens require work.”
“Traction, com.”
He didn’t seem to care.
“So what else do you have for me?” he asked.
I decided not to share the sunflower seeds. There weren’t many left in the cache, and the new crop wouldn’t be ready to harvest until later in the warm season.
“Do you know how to fish?” I asked instead.
I thought fishing would test his capacity for patience and silence, two qualities essential for trapping a deer, something we could attempt in the afternoon, if the fishing went okay. It didn’t. His casts were clumsy, and he swore when his rod hit the ground. Despite his outbursts, I caught three walleye, which I cooked in the coals of a fire. With my knife I removed the sweet flesh of the walleye from its skin and passed chunks to the stranger, who sat on a driftwood log while I squatted beside the fire. He tried not to let the oily meat slip off his fingers, but a few times it did. He picked it from the sand and ate without chewing, swallowing pieces whole, sand and all, and licked his fingers and lips after every bite. I sucked portions of the fish off the blade of my knife.
We didn’t speak as we ate. Both of us were hungry, and I worried that, like the goose, the three fish wouldn’t be enough. The stranger seemed to enjoy the taste of the walleye; at least he didn’t complain. And perhaps because there were three of them and I was parceling out the meat, it seemed like more food than the skewers of goose had offered.
As we ate I reassessed his worth to me. So far he hadn’t shown much aptitude for trapping and fishing. Of course, his size and strength would be a benefit in hauling water; his skill with mason’s tools, in splitting wood. But could I teach him to pick vegetables without his destroying the plant? I doubted it. Perhaps he could learn to harvest geese with the net. What we really needed, though, was a deer. If he couldn’t be quiet enough to lie in wait to net and wrestle one to the ground, perhaps he could run one to death. Or spear one. Otis and I had tried this, but after the first thrust (with knife tied to a stick), the deer had fled and we lost its track up the valley.
I weighed the benefit between feeding him long enough so he could contribute to food production and urging him to leave White Earth River right away. The more I thought about him, the more I worried that his flight from the quarry might bring agents to White Earth River. Perhaps he lied about having an uncle in the Center and I would be stuck listening to the sound of his voice as I taught him skills for survival. And where would he live? Not in the cave, not in the monorail car. Perhaps he could live in the boathouse. Or perhaps he didn’t want to stay. Perhaps after the meal of walleye, he’d have enough energy to leave.
As a start to fortifying him, for either trapping a deer or leaving (I still hadn’t decided which I preferred), I gave him the entire third walleye. While he picked it apart, I stripped out of my shorts and waded into the river. The muddy bottom dropped off gradually, and the water cooled my body and eased the tension that had built up from my worry about the stranger. Seeing him in person, despite the irritations that came from being with him, had at least cleared the sounds of his speech from my head. I wondered if all people were like the stranger, so different from me, from Otis, and this is what you have to put up with to be with another person. Companionship didn’t seem like it was worth all the trouble. Perhaps it would be different with my parents.
I washed the coating of dust from my body and then swam to a deep pool and dove to the rocky bottom. Fish scattered—another meal’s worth, at least—and I dug my fingers into the bottom and floated, suspended, and let the cool water numb me, until I couldn’t hold my breath any longer.
As I walked up from the river, I slicked back my black hair and squeezed water from the ends. I was small compared to the stranger. I lacked the thick, curly chest hair that made his muscles seem heavy and powerful. Except for a small patch around my penis, my body was nearly devoid of hair, most of it fine, barely visible, and the hair on my head was long and straight, not like the woolly thicket the stranger had. I felt him watching me. His hands were under his head, bending his neck forward so he could observe me. After a moment, he sat up and pointed at my legs.
“What’s wrong with them, com?”
They had no bites, cuts, or rashes on them, so I knew he was referring to their shape.
“Nothing, they’re fine,” I said, not meeting his stare.
“Then why are they all bent out?”
I had once compared my legs to Otis’s while we were bathing in the shallows. “Lack of food,” Otis had told me. I had stopped breast-feeding a few months after I was born, the night my mother disappeared. I had only survived because Otis had chewed food and forced it into my mouth with his tongue. Still, it had taken me a long time to thrive. “Most weeks, I was ready to begin digging your grave,” Otis had once recounted.
“They work fine.” I stretched to my full height and faced the stranger.
“Traction, com, but they look funny. I’m surprised they let your parents keep you.”
“Not everyone looks the same,” I said.
My face grew warm, and I looked away.
“Ah, com, you’re spraying me, now. I mean, what type of woman would want you with those legs? Certainly not one in the Center. They’re all perfect. That’s why I’m going there. To find a perfect one.”
I wiped the grit from my feet and strapped on my sandals.
“I thought you were going to find your uncle,” I said.
“That, too.” The stranger shifted in the sand. “What do you think they look like?”
“What?”
“Th
e women.”
I thought about the book of photographs of Otis and Malèna in Bismarck.
“They have long black hair and wear special dresses and shoes that make them stand tall on their toes . . . and they like to sit at tables and eat big meals.”
The stranger squirmed and leaned forward. He spread his legs wide, as though his testicles were large and needed extra space to rest in the sand.
“Right. They’re all Office, School, or Clinic. They don’t really work,” he said.
He closed his eyes and opened his mouth, moving his jaw back and forth while he worked his hand into his shorts.
“Damn, this is going to be great. Center women are the best. That’s what my uncle says. Firm, tight, beautiful.”
He was grasping his penis now and had pushed down his shorts.
“Tell me, com, their tits, what do you think they’re like?”
I imagined my mother, perhaps in a bed, perhaps in a folding chair, as she cradled me in her arms, my lips at her breast.
“Their breasts are full of milk so they can feed their babies,” I said. “This is necessary for the child’s survival.”
The stranger stopped stroking his penis and laughed. “Com, are you spraying me again? How old are you, anyway?”
“At least fourteen years.” I forgot to add the three years before we had started notching the cottonwood post in the cave.
“Yeah, I thought you were a little young for it. You’ve probably only drove the bone with boys.”
I remained silent. I knew he was talking about the penis. I knew how the penis behaved in the middle of the night, in dreams. I knew this felt good. And I had decided that Otis had probably shared this with Malèna when they were entwined together at the end of the day and that this type of touching was what Otis meant by make love. Perhaps the stranger practiced a version of it with boys.
“You have driven it with boys, com?”
He was stroking his penis slowly.
“No.”
“I can’t believe it. Well, I could do you right now, if you want, so you know what it feels like. I’m getting pretty hard just talking about it.”
