During-the-Event

by Roger Wall

  Above the door handle was a square metal lever. I pressed this, and, with a slight push, the door opened. Cool damp air and the musty odor of mold filled my nose. A window almost as tall as the ceiling lined the far side of the room and provided the only light to navigate through the brown-and-green-streaked walls of the short entry corridor.

  The floor was stone, and a carpet of muted roses, their blossoms full with red, orange, and yellow petals, covered much of it. A metal-framed bench with brown cushions lined one edge of the rug, which squished as I stepped on a corner. Above, on the ceiling, a brown stain showed where the roof had leaked—like in the back of the cave where water seeped through soil and rock, darkening the cottonwood timbers. At one end of the room was the kitchen. A vine-covered window above the sink barely admitted light. On the other end of the room was a wall of bookshelves with a desk and monitor built into them.

  Behind the house was an expanse of sand, dotted with neat piles of rocks and the blackened remains of burned trees. Over this landscape arched a lattice structure as tall as the house and constructed of six-sided interlocking windows. A patch of green, moss or grass—I couldn’t tell—grew in the shade of an elm tree that had fallen and punched a hole through the structure. Something had happened here, a fire, it looked like.

  I raised a latch on the tall, wide window and slid it open. It was a door, after all. The decayed wooden planking of the deck squeaked under my weight. The emptiness reminded me of my town. The warm, moldy air under the false sky of the lattice of windows made me cough, and I went back into the house.

  As my eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room, I noticed four wooden masks in a row on a wall. They seemed to meet my stare and scowl. They had been carved with a knife, with most of the cuts in the wood not having been smoothed but left irregular and jagged. The open mouths were decorated with shells and feathers and pieces of metal and leather. White had been painted around the eyes. Only the cheeks and brows had been polished, and these caught the faint light coming through the door. I looked out again at the barren land, trying to see it as these wooden faces might. They seemed to be angry about what had happened.

  I decided not to sleep in the house for fear of disturbing the masks. Instead, under the lattice of windows next to a charred stump, I made a fire with the rotting deck planks. Smoke settled around me, and the smell of it and the burning wood reminded me of the cave. I collected water to boil—I had no tea to add to it—from a downspout and chewed the remainder of my sunflower seeds into a warm mash. I wanted to lie down, get out of my wet clothes, and sleep. In the house I found two blankets, a thin one, which I slept on, and a feather-filled one, which I covered myself with.

  I lay beside the dying fire and listened to the rain hitting the windows above me. The sound reminded me of rain falling on the tin roof of the monorail platform. In the darkness rounds of thunder passed over the prairie, and I waited for jags of lightning to brighten the sky. Although I was lying on my back, resting, my body seemed to be in the lake, floating in the water. The sensation of rising up and down with the swells filled me. The clammy blanket on my chest reminded me of pressing against the taut muscles of the stranger’s back, feeling his body’s warmth through his wet T-shirt while I clasped his cold, water-softened hands over the mast. When I rolled to my side to free myself of this feeling, I felt the stranger slipping away, bumping once against my chest before vanishing into the lake’s depth. Not even my legs, vigorously treading water, felt him pass. I shuddered and curled into a ball, with my back to the masks.

  I woke in the morning haunted by a dream: Animals with four legs, long bushy tails, and gray-black matted hair were prowling the prairie. They might have been dogs or coyotes but seemed to resemble most the wolves I had read about in stories. Their heads were raised in the air as though they were howling, but instead of a howl, a mournful song, sadder than any Otis had ever sung, came out of their mouths. Their sides were shredded and ratty looking, their coats scarred with oozing wounds, as though another animal had attacked and bit them—pulled off fur and tissue to eat strips of flesh. Some of them had ribs exposed. Despite all this, though, they had kept singing.

  I didn’t know what to make of the dream, but it began to inhabit me and fill the space in my mind that the stranger had previously occupied.

  A humid, cool cloud seemed to engulf the lattice and make the sky thick and gray, low enough to touch, if the plastic windows hadn’t been there. Rain fell through the hole in the roof, and a wet breeze stirred the air. My whole body was sore, as if the wooden faces had slunk down off the wall during the night and bitten me all over with their angry mouths.

  Despite living in moisture and wetness, I was thirsty. There were cooking pots in the kitchen of the abandoned house. A small one I used to collect water from the downspout. On the desk in the bookshelves was a notebook, with pages filled with drawings and lines of formulae that I didn’t understand but used to start the damp kindling for a fire. While I waited for water to boil, I searched my pockets for sunflower seeds. Only two remained in a deep corner of a front pocket. I would need more than that to get home, especially if I were stranded at this house until the weather cleared. And without a sail, just how long would it take to paddle back to White Earth River?

  In the bottom of my pack I found the broccoli, which I tossed into the pot, along with wilted kale, which had already lost most of its flavor. I was careful not to unwrap the nightshade. Dampness had softened and opened my blisters. I might poison myself if I touched the herb.

  I sat close to the fire and smelled the sharp aroma of the broccoli as its steam rose in the close air. I could walk home, perhaps finding the monorail line to our town, but leaving the canoe behind seemed to be unwise—the windy passage up the lake was the only route home that I was sure of. Although the swells and the cold currents had terrified me, I knew I could trace the current, pulsing beneath me, back to White Earth River. Once the rain ceased, the swells would flatten out. If I got as far as the bridge, I could rest. Cross the lake there and then follow the shoreline until I entered White Earth Bay. If paddling wore me out, I could cross the bridge on foot. Perhaps a road would lead to White Earth River. Perhaps walking would allow me to search inland for my parents—I hadn’t seen any towns on the lake’s shore. Perhaps they had escaped to another river valley. But were my parents farmers? Hadn’t they lived in Bismarck before White Earth River? Maybe agents had realized they were best suited to city life and relocated them to the Center. Perhaps the stranger was right: I might find them there. Maybe the risk of being arrested was the cost of finding them.

  I began searching the cabinets for left-behind food and water jugs. Whichever route I took, to the Center or White Earth River, I’d need to carry water and food. A drawer was filled with silver packets with the letters MRG across the front in black, with an illustration of an arm, flexed to show bulging muscles. The stranger had spoken of MRGs, so I assumed this was the type of food he ate. The first packet I picked up had the word PROTEIN written under the arm. That’s what I needed to paddle to the Center, muscles like the ones in the picture.

  The hard bar of protein was sweet but difficult to chew and salty, which made me thirstier. In a cabinet near the floor I was lucky to find several clear glass bottles filled with what I first thought was an emergency supply of water.

  The labels on the bottles contained a drawing of a large, bright green plant with pointed leaves, with a yellow sun overhead in a blue sky. In black cursive were the words: “In praise of Agave, Tequila, spirit of the Ancients.” I didn’t know that tequila contained alcohol, like the tesgüino my father used to drink. When I unscrewed the cap and inhaled the liquid’s musky aroma, I wondered if it might be poisonous, although who would pour poison into such beautiful bottles and keep a cabinet full of them in his kitchen, I asked myself.

  I sipped the tequila. It was smooth and thick in my mouth. I swallowed and felt my throat and then my stomach burn. I thought I had made a fatal mistake, but so
on pleasing warmth spread through my body. I took a longer drink and waited for another shot of heat. I tried to swallow a mouthful but choked and blew a mist of liquid out my nose.

  “Whoa!” I said, and then began coughing. I sat down on the bench facing the bookshelves and rubbed my nose until the fire in my nostrils subsided.

  Despite my damp clothes, for the first time in two days I felt warm. I sipped more tequila and stared at the masks on the wall. I began to feel loose and happy. Time slowed down. I settled into the brown leather cushions on the bench.

  I alternated between looking at the masks and looking at the burnt landscape out the back door. There had to be a connection. The masks had to know something about what had happened. Every time I returned my focus to the masks, it seemed that their expression had changed. I began to feel that they were watching me, that they had decided I was the one who had burned down the trees.

  “I didn’t do that,” I said to the masks and nodded toward the backyard, “so don’t frown at me. And I didn’t kill the stranger, so you can’t blame me for that, either.”

  Their expressions softened, as though they were saying, “Oh, no, we didn’t think that, we were just wondering why you were here.”

  “Just gathering provisions before I leave,” I said to them.

  “No rush,” their expressions seemed to say. “We’re happy to have a visitor. Stay as long as you like.”

  I raised my glass to them in thanks. I liked the taste of the tequila, the woody smell, and the sense of wholeness that it gave me. I drank more.

  “Hey, let me sing you something,” I said to the masks, beginning the song that the wolves had sung: “Hi-ne-a, hi-ne-a, hi-ne-a. . . .”

  I wanted Otis’s spirit to hear me. I wanted to tell him about my dream. But the faces were right there, looking at me and asking, “Yes?”

  “The wolves . . . they were behind the house last night. Did you hear them? Right next to me. Singing in my ear. Hi-ne-a, hi-ne-a, hi-ne-a. . . . And you,” I pointed the glass at them, “I felt you, biting me in the ass!” I laughed, and the masks laughed along with me.

  “My grandfather. My grandfather, he knew about the currents. That’s why he took quick baths and never learned to swim and didn’t wade out into the river. He knew what they were up to even though he tried to hide from them. The basement . . . Ha! The Missouri River. It’s still down there even though you can’t see it! I felt it the first time I sailed into the lake!”

  I took another swallow. I began to suspect that a connection existed between the masks and the currents of the Missouri, and that they, the masks, knew what had happened on the lake and that the currents had somehow signaled to the masks that they would push me toward the house where the masks lived.

  “Hey, tell us a story!” I screamed at the shelves of books.

  I set the bottle on the floor and staggered to the bookshelf and opened a thick book. It contained page after page of diagrams—jumbles of lines, rows of numbers, funny symbols, and an occasional arrow. “E-lec-trical En-gin-eer-ing,” I sounded out the title. I dropped it onto the floor and giggled at the thump it made.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked the masks. “Like pounding corn! You know about pounding corn?”

  I liked the sound of books slapping against the stone tiles, and the floor quickly became littered with dense, unreadable texts, some with broken spines and others with covers attached by only a few threads.

  “Useless books!”

  I laughed and continued yanking volume after volume from the shelves and watched as they spilled onto the wet rug. The heavier books I raised over my head and threw them onto the stone floor to see how loud of a sound I could make. The masks didn’t seem to like what I was doing with the books. They began to scowl.

  “What? You don’t think this is funny?” I asked them.

  Their lack of a response told me that, no, they didn’t think it was funny. This made me sad, and I looked down at the mess I had created. A book with a photograph of a desert landscape on its cover caught my eye. A type of butte, not unlike the buttes above White Earth River, was in the background. Holding this volume open, I stumbled back and forth, circling around as I tried to sit down, and fell backwards and landed with a wet squish on one of the rug’s damp rose petals.

  “Whoa! You gotta see this!” I shouted to the masks and held up the book. It contained photos of deserts, all taken in the late afternoon sun, when the earth was in position so the sun could rake across the land.

  “Hey, where’s the sun now?” I asked the masks. “Maybe you can call it out!”

  I looked at the cool light draining through the glass door. I propped the book open against a metal leg of the bench, so a warm, sunny landscape rose up from the floor.

  There had to be other picture books on the shelves. I’d decorate the room with them!

  But the next one I pulled from the shelf was only a gardening manual, not unlike the two we had in the cave that Otis had made me read, often several times, as we tried to figure out how to prevent pests from devouring our crops.

  Slips of paper left between the pages of this one guided me through chapters on greenhouse construction, desert gardens, and drainage. Some of the text was underlined, and on various pages someone had written notes: “Who cares about melting ice caps, rising sea levels, tropical storms, failing dams, floods? Those climate change jerks got it all wrong. We’re gonna fry! Forest fires, scorched earth, drought, dust bowls. The desert will do us in!”

  On the bottom of one page was scrawled: “Torch the forest, crank up the heat, blow it all around, do the calculations, become vindicated!”

  I read the notes several times and then shouted in a gruff voice, the way I imagined the person who had written these words, a man, of course, would speak: “Torch the forest, crank up the heat, blow it all around!”

  The sound of my voice made me laugh, and I recited this line a number of times to the masks, as though I were delivering it to a chunky-mouthed audience, who, in return, were laughing, “Haw, haw, haw,” their big loose teeth rattling against each other. But then, the laughter stopped and a chant began, a guttural word that sounded like “Guilty!”

  “I told you I didn’t do it!” I shouted at them. “I’m a gardener! I don’t burn down forests!”

  The man had burned up the trees, I screamed. And perhaps had died in the fire in the backyard. Or maybe the masks banished him, forced him to sail off into Lake Sakakawea and then capsized him, so the currents could punish him, as they had perhaps punished the stranger for killing his father.

  “Make sure no one else gets his hands on this one!” I shook the book at the masks and then put it back on the shelf.

  A thin, flimsy booklet lay open on the floor. A grainy black-and-white photo showed a man walking barefoot along a mountain trail and leading a mule with bulging sacks lashed across its back. I picked up the booklet. “Farmers of the Sierra Madre Occidental” was printed in black across a soft blue cover. Two bands of wire held together what was little more than a handful of paper folded in half.

  The masks had seemed to shut up, knowing that they couldn’t get rid of me the way they had the man who burnt down the trees in the backyard. The room became quiet, and I settled onto the dark leather cushions, which gave a moist sigh as I collapsed into them.

  The farmer in the photograph had a tanned face similar to mine, although his was lined with wrinkles. His hair was black, like mine, and his pants and shirt were baggy and dirty, like my clothes. He was not smiling but looked fearful. Underneath the photograph was written: “Bringing corn to Ojachichi, Chihuahua state, Mexico.”

  I began reading the booklet, a doctor’s account of the year he had spent in a remote Tarahumara village in the Sierra Madre Occidental while he set up a rural clinic. Although most of the story concerned the difficulties of living in primitive conditions, there were also long passages about the friends he had made, the people standing beside their houses, fields, and animals in the photographs.
A map of the area contained the same names as the ones I found in the text and captions. I sounded out these words in slurred speech, not knowing how to pronounce the words correctly.

  “They’re not going to make it,” Otis had always said whenever I had asked about people living in other countries. “They can’t grow enough food. Surpluses on the open market vanished before we starting building the Center. No fuel for transport. Starvation, disease, bad weather, drought, and war will finish everyone off.” But Mexico was different. Like Canada, it was part of the North American continental government. Though its population had been culled, the doctor’s study proved that these farmers of the Sierra Madre Occidental had survived and escaped relocation.

  In the last years of his life, Otis had tried to reconstruct the story of his father’s ancestors but had stumbled when I had asked where his father’s family originated, abruptly ending his tale by saying, “Our people have always been here,” meaning along the Missouri River, “since the beginning of time,” his voice rising to an angry silence, as though he were mad at himself for not being able to figure out the history of his supposed Hidatsa roots.

  But that was Otis’s story, not mine. I wasn’t Hidatsa. My father had to come from what used to be Mexico. My resemblance to the farmers was no coincidence. And that day, drunk in the house of the masks and surrounded by the slick pages of textbooks in the damp, cool room, I could see what must have happened: my family originated in a high desert plain in Mexico where the days were warm; one of the members, a man, delivered a load of corn to a distant market and stayed there; years later his son took a sack of corn to another market farther away still; another son, many generations after that, arrived, perhaps with a wife and children, in Bismarck; and eventually another son, my father, Javier, met my mother, Maria, and they married. To find my ancestors wasn’t a matter of reciting a fake family history but of simply walking in the right direction, south, until I came to the landscape that resembled the one in this photograph. My family hadn’t died of hunger. The government hadn’t relocated or eradicated them. They lived safely in the mountains. They had their own clinic and knew how to grow crops in a way that perhaps everyone else had forgotten. They didn’t use bicycles or canoes. They walked the land. I was the last of these people, not of Otis’s people.