by Roger Wall
A space opened in my mind. I tucked the blue booklet in the waistband of my shorts and struggled to my feet. I felt strong enough to swim to Mexico. This is where I would go to find my father and mother. I took another swallow of tequila.
Suddenly, I was ravenous, and the image of a fish roasting over coals became fixed in my mind. “A walleye!” I shouted at the masks.
But first I had to find a fishing pole.
I weaved between the junipers, over the crushed stones from the house to the road. I stumbled down the hill, my sandals slapping the asphalt and echoing against the low sky. I had begun to sweat, and my head felt as though it were stuffed with goose feathers.
I made it to the cement block boathouse, where I found an old spinning rig, with a dried worm still baiting the rusty hook.
The muddy brown surface of the lake bulged, rising and falling as though the currents were coming up to breathe. If I set out now on this swollen sea, the currents would pull me under in an instant, I thought.
I dug for a fresh worm with my hands, and with shaking, numb fingers tried to thread it onto the hook. I pricked my fingers twice before stitching the squirming animal into place. Watching the bait swirl through the sky as I cast made me dizzy. I nudged together two rocks to hold the rod. I couldn’t wait to bathe, to let the water clear my head, which seemed less and less capable of directing the rest of my body.
I felt nothing except a brief stab in my groin when I waded naked into the lake. I splashed water over my face, arms, and chest and rubbed my skin with silt, working up a muddy slurry. Then I dove toward the bottom and pulled myself along the soft floor of the lake with my hands, my eyes open. Are you down here? I asked the stranger. Did you follow me? Or are the currents rolling you around the bottom of the lake?
I burst to the surface, gasping, out of breath. A sharp cold split through my head. My arms had turned into a blotch of blue and white. I was turning into wood.
My body quaked and my legs went into a spasm. Mist separated and lifted from the surface of the water. Among the shapes of the low clouds I saw a distant shore and a path breaching a bank. This would lead south to the mountainous desert plain of the Sierra Madre Occidental, the homeland of my father. I would float on my back and kick my feet and let the clouds guide me across the lake.
A splash echoed. The tip of the fishing rod dipped and jerked. A fish. I plowed through the water to grab the rod’s foam handle before it was dragged into the lake. When I bent down to pick up the rod, blackness and then bright colors pulsed before me. My fingers were too numb to operate the reel, so I walked up the grassy slope until my catch, a small walleye, flopped ashore. I hooked my stiff fingers into its gills. In my other hand I carried my shorts. Midway up the street toward the Mask House, my stomach convulsed. I stumbled and tripped. Pebbles and stones cut into my palms. The walleye slipped from my fingers. The tequila was poison after all! The masks had tricked me into drinking it! This was how they had planned to kill me: make me kill myself!
My wrist throbbed. Was it broken? Sweat covered my forehead. I tried to stand and walk, but dizziness hit me. I retched. The poison burned my throat as it came out, and I spoke the language of the ancestors, the words that I was supposed to say when Otis died but didn’t. And then it was over. I heard water bubbling uphill of me and followed the sound. From a split in the asphalt, water gurgled into the street. Perhaps it was from a ruptured pipe, but it was clear and clean.
I crouched on the wet pavement and slurped water from the accidental spring and then stretched out below the little flow so the water could cleanse me.
What a fool. How could I have believed I’d be spared the masks’ evil? That it existed for others and not for me? They’d been laughing at me the whole time as they lured me into their trap of the tequila. I’d only survived them, and the currents, too, because the singing wolves were stronger than any of this evil. The singing wolves were my guardian spirit. That was the revelation of my dream, I’m sure.
I didn’t return to the house of the masks. Higher ground had always offered safety, and this was where I headed. At the top of the hill, the street joined a dirt road that led to a narrow, stone passageway overgrown with rows of Russian olives on each side. I almost didn’t see it. The path opened upon first a shed, then a patio covered with a willow trellis, then a stone stove, and then a house. Beyond the house were an old orchard and a garden with a fence around it. The prairie started after this and stretched until it met the gray sky.
The house was tall, with a front door and windows that rose above a stone foundation partially hidden by June berry bushes. A wide porch wrapped from the front to one side. Peeling white paint covered its wooden sides. The front door was unlocked, but after I entered the house, I turned a knob until the lock clicked—added protection against the masks’ evil.
I wandered through the ground floor of the abandoned house and ran my hands over the old furniture, touched the soft wool of the big chairs and drew my fingers through the dust on the round oak table. I didn’t feel alone. People frozen in black-and-white photographs on the walls looked down at me: women and men with arms around waists or over shoulders, laughing as their dogs sniffed, fought, and humped each other. In the backgrounds of the photos, I could see the porch and garden, a table arranged with platters of food, a fire pit in a field, the deck of a sailboat in mid-lake, where naked people hugged and kissed and drank from tall brown bottles. These people filled the room with life, and I was sorry to have arrived too late to be in the photographs with them.
I settled into a large, dark-green chair and wrapped myself in a blanket made from wool all the colors of the rainbow. A wide stool, of the same dark-green fabric as the chair, gave my bowed legs plenty of room to rest. I slept through the afternoon and into the night. In the morning, I savored the drowsy feeling that sleep had brought. Brightness filled the room, the rain had stopped, the sun was out. I had a headache.
Later that morning, outside on the patio, under the willow trellis, I was overcome with a longing for the stranger’s voice. For a moment, I believed that if I stood there long enough, someone would arrive to replace the memory of his speech. I couldn’t move. I stood for minutes, listening for footsteps, words, a human’s voice, but all I heard was the emptiness of the prairie ringing in my ears.
I collected my pack from the damp sand of the burned land behind the house. In the street I found the walleye, stiff and bent into a “J.” I threw it into a ditch and then headed uphill, my pack slung over my shoulder.
I benefited from what the owners of the house had left behind. Upstairs in a bedroom off the end of the hall I found dry, almost new, clothes in a dresser: a pair of stretchy black underwear that fit me snugly, an orange shirt with buttons down the front, and a pair of dark-red pants that were baggy around the hips and wide and loose in the legs.
When I stepped back to see myself in the mirror hanging over the dresser, the first intact mirror I had ever seen, my sunken cheeks and dirty face, not my new clothes, caught my attention. “I’m a poor farmer from the Sierra Madre Occidental,” I said to my reflection, although I looked much more beaten down than the farmers in the photographs in the blue booklet. I needed to eat.
I collected what I could around the house: chokecherries growing on the trellis; June berries along the foundation; a tangle of bean and pea vines, large fibrous zucchinis, dense hedges of spinach, spindly, pockmarked lettuce, and cloves of garlic and onion bulbs in the garden; and plums in a small orchard grove on the edge of the prairie.
On the patio I ate from a bright red plate that I imagined the people in the photographs had eaten off of as they sat around the rusting table, whose top was a design of flowers and leaves. The metal chairs were uncomfortable and hurt my back; I often ate standing up. As I shoveled food into my mouth, I imagined conversations and laughter, like the ones I thought the men and women in the photographs would have had. I wished that those people could have stepped out of their photographs and come onto the pati
o and told me what had happened to them, to this place.
Especially, I would have liked to talk to the two women in the large color photograph over the fireplace. The frame was painted gold, with vines carved into the wood. The women stood naked with a dog in the middle of the stone path. Their hands were on their hips and their feet were spread. The woman on the left had wavy, silver hair, full breasts, a round belly, and plump thighs. She wasn’t smiling. The woman on the right had short, straight orange hair, small, taut breasts, a concave stomach, and skinny legs. She looked young enough to be the other woman’s daughter. Her red lips were parted in a wide grin. The large thin dog with short wiry gray hair stood in front of them, its long wispy muzzle reaching just above the black triangles of the women’s groins. “First and Last Family Portrait on the Eve of Goodbye, Parshall Bay” was written in pencil below the photograph. The laughing people in the black-and-white photographs had to have been their friends. Who had been killed, relocated? Who had run away or was searching for someone who had disappeared?
I tried to imagine the shutting down of this small community on Parshall Bay, the inevitable food and water shortages, the lack of electricity, the exit and disappearance of people. In White Earth River I had experienced this from my mother’s breast, from my father’s and Otis’s arms, too young to remember except through Otis’s stories, but a participant nonetheless. Separation or disappearance isn’t the same as dying. In some ways dying is better because at least you know where the dead go—into the spirit world, where you have the chance of someday reuniting with them.
Before I could head south, I needed to harvest and dry the corn, secure seeds, and cure fish for the trip. I began to worry about finding the sail.
I tried to scavenge a sail and mast from one of the beached sailboats, but they were too large for the canoe. If the sailboats hadn’t been so heavy, with their keels wedged into the slit, I would’ve dragged one to water’s edge and launched it.
I scouted the shoreline for the sail, first on foot and then from the canoe. It was tedious work. I ran aground in muck when mats of reeds and driftwood tricked me into believing I had sighted the sail. The wide northern finger of the lake ended in a wetland that spread out over a kilometer before hitting dry ground. Lots of ducks, but no sail.
Eventually, I found it on the shoreline south of Parshall Bay. The wind had blown it into a shallow cove where it floated in ankle-deep water, rising and falling as though the white cloth were breathing. The mast and boom, partially buried in silt, had kept the sail anchored. I didn’t want to believe that my search had ended, but the sail was there, dirty and wet, impossible to ignore. I couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t found it and stay up the hill in the women’s house with the soft chairs and wide bed. There wasn’t enough food to eat. And I hated being in a place haunted by people who had been there not so long ago. As I rinsed the mud off the fabric and checked it for tears, a wave of anger washed over me and I almost drew my knife to slice the sail into shreds. When the anger passed, sadness filled me, and I wanted to cry.
PART V:
NOLA
When I set out from Parshall Bay, I sensed the route the stranger and I had taken down the lake. It was preserved just under the surface of the water and sloshed against the hull of the canoe to help me keep a straight navigational line. The afternoons of sailing alone had revealed this aspect of the lake, which is why I could always find my way back to White Earth Bay, no matter how far from shore I sailed or how near dusk I returned to the bay.
The day was sunny, and the gentle breeze allowed me to manage the sail while using a paddle to steer without a struggle. I scanned the southern shore of the Van Hook Arm for the path I had seen while drunk on the tequila but saw only a dense continuous band of trees. Perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right place. I was sure there was a passageway south from the lake.
I paddled through the narrow bend of the lake and hoisted the sail to glide under the suspension of the bridge and into open water. This is when I saw Nola, not too far from the distant northern shore. The sun caught her boat, which sat low in the water. At first I couldn’t tell whether she was man or woman. I saw only her boat and the long oars slicing the air. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Another person right there, one long tack away. Or was I imagining this? Had spending so much time in the house with photographs on the wall made me conjure up a person to fill my life? Although my time with the stranger hadn’t gone well—and I had no guarantee that Nola wouldn’t present another disaster—I didn’t think about the outcome, only about the unlikelihood of meeting another person anytime soon. The inhabitants of Parshall Bay had vanished, but here, right before my eyes, was a person, another chance. I had to sail fast enough to cut off whoever it was and not let him or her get away.
Because the rudder was broken, I tied the mast line around my waist and used both hands to steer with the paddle as the wind set the boat on edge. When I was within a short paddling distance of Nola, I dropped the sail and drifted.
She seemed to be floundering, rotating in a circle, going nowhere. She’d dig the long oars of the boat into the water, but when she pulled on them, the starboard oar skipped over the surface while the port oar pivoted the craft unevenly. Her struggles made me wonder whether she knew how to row. Or perhaps she was in danger. How did she get here in the first place?
I paddled toward her. As I closed in, I could hear the oars straining in their oarlocks and churning up water and hitting against the hull. The boat was long and narrow and barely floated above the water line. Sunlight reflected off its purple hull. Aluminum outriggers mounted with oarlocks were suspended over the water. When Nola saw me, she dropped the oars and reached for a cylindrical object dangling from her chest and held it up. This was a monocular, I later learned. I continued to paddle toward her. When I was twenty or thirty meters away, she pulled another cylinder-shaped object—this time from her waist—and pointed it at me. She called out:
“Don’t get any closer.”
I backstroked to halt the canoe and sculled figure eights as I considered fleeing. What was she pointing at me? A laser capable of stunning me, she later explained.
What stopped me from leaving, though, wasn’t fear of being stunned but her glow, which radiated like a halo against the dry landscape. If I hadn’t heard the noise of her oars, I would’ve thought she was a mirage.
“I won’t hurt you,” I called out and waved.
She took up the monocular again. After a moment she clipped the laser onto her belt. The monocular swung from her neck. She grabbed the oars, satisfied, I guess, that I wasn’t a threat.
“Who are you?” she shouted across the water.
“D. E.,” I shouted back. “During-the-Event Pérez.”
She didn’t introduce herself but asked, “Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Where’s that?”
“White Earth River.”
“Is anyone there?”
“No. Just me. My grandfather died. And so did the stranger.”
She drifted to within a few meters of me. She feathered her oars to turn her boat broadside and kept an oar and outrigger between us. I couldn’t see her eyes because they were covered by black sunglasses but did have a good view of her skin. It was covered in sweat. Perhaps that’s what made its golden color glow—sunlight reflecting off beads of moisture. She had well-developed arms and broad shoulders and practically no hair, only a stubble of yellow fuzz. She wasn’t wearing a life preserver but a radiant purple sleeveless top that matched the color of the boat. She seemed not to have any fat on her body, only muscle, which bulged through her tight purple top and black shorts, and two prominent points on her chest—her nipples.
She had to be from the Center. No one living off the land or wandering and lost, like the stranger had been, could look this neat and clean. Someone with such perfect proportions and coloration and as thin as the boat she rowed couldn’t be violent, I thought. Perhaps she was the perfect type of woman th
e stranger had wanted to find. But, still, how did she get here?
“Your grandfather? A disease?” she asked.
“No, old age,” I said.
“And the stranger . . . what about him?” she asked.
“He ran away from a quarry,” I said.
“A runaway, okay. But he died, you said.”
“In the storm. Our boat capsized. He couldn’t swim. I tried to save him, but the currents pulled him under.”
“There’re no currents, here. This is a reservoir. The only things in it are tree stumps and rocks, maybe a few junked cars.”
“The Missouri River. It’s down there. I felt it. The singing wolves protected me from it.”
“Technically, you’re correct. The Missouri runs through the lake, but the Garrison dam controls everything. That’s why the water level rises and falls, discounting flash floods and evaporation. That’s about the extent of the current, okay? A vestige. And wolves howl, they don’t sing.”
I didn’t want to argue with her, although I started to doubt whether I wanted to waste much effort in convincing her to come back to White Earth River with me.
“No diseases, you’re sure?”
“No diseases.”
“Okay, then with the runaway dead, that gives me rights of first contact. You agree?”
“I guess so.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, “rights of first contact.”
