During-the-Event

by Roger Wall

  “Of course, it would’ve been more interesting if I’d been literally the first to meet you, but since the runaway’s dead that’s irrelevant. Officially, I’d be considered the first.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  What did it matter? Behind the aggression and impatience, her words hid something else, fear perhaps, or exhaustion?

  She reached under her seat and retrieved a bottle and sucked from it. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and rubbed a coating of sweat from her scalp.

  “This energy drink is barely keeping me alive,” she said. “I hope you have something better to eat in White Earth River.”

  I told her about the garden and how we could harvest vegetables, maybe catch a fish or goose, perhaps a deer.

  “I would love some corn,” she said. “We eat that in the Center.”

  “Yeah, we do, too.”

  “We?”

  “My grandfather and I.”

  “I thought he was dead.”

  “He is. I mean before, after last year’s harvest.”

  “Oh, right.”

  We drifted, not speaking, while the wind gently pushed us toward shore. The space between us gradually closed. Nola took a black square off her belt and spoke to it and then stared at it for a while.

  “It’s not far, the bay and your river,” she said.

  “I know. Did your thing tell you that?” I asked.

  “My hedgehog? Yeah, its GPS. You know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a satellite-based navigation system. It generates maps and has a route and distance calculator. It also connects me to my parents and advisor, so I’m never by myself.”

  “It does everything,” I laughed. I didn’t believe her.

  “As long as the sun can charge it.”

  She clipped the hedgehog back on her belt.

  “By the way, I’m Nola,” she said. “I guess you should know that if we’re going to row together.”

  “No-la,” I said her name slowly, weighting the o and a, as though the name were two words. “No-la.”

  “That’s right. Nola. I’m from the Center.”

  “I figured you were.”

  “Good. Good.”

  She wanted me to lead; she’d feel safer that way, she said. But I told her that I’d paddle more slowly than she could row because I had only one paddle whereas she had two oars.

  “Barely two oars,” she said. “The starboard pin just cracked. I heard it. Now I have to nurse it or it’ll sheer completely.”

  “We have rowboats. Maybe you can use one of their oarlocks.”

  “Does my boat look like a rowboat? This is a flat-water shell. The parts are performance titanium and carbon fiber with tight clearances. I’m sure what’s lying around your place is old aluminum. I doubt it would fit.”

  “I have tools.”

  “Well, maybe we can fashion something. Worse case, I call for a part. But I’ll get points deducted for lack of resourcefulness. I’d like to avoid that if I can.”

  I imagined a helicopter dropping a piece of metal from the sky and supposed it could drop food, too, if she asked for it.

  Before we set off, Nola warned, “Remember, I have protection. If I fire this thing, the military will be here in five minutes.” She patted the cylinder clipped on her belt.

  I decided, then, that maybe her laser was more of a signal than a device that would stun me. I could cover a lot of distance in five minutes. I wasn’t worried.

  I wondered if Nola was the type of woman Otis had in mind for me, if his spirit or perhaps the singing wolves had delivered her to me. Yet, she didn’t seem to be very friendly, and I worried that the conditions of companionship weren’t going to be much different from those that the stranger had demanded: food, shelter, and some odd form of friendship.

  The fractured oarlock made Nola’s strokes unequal, and we paddled and rowed up the White Earth Bay in a crooked line. I put up with the slowness for a while but then suggested tying the boats stern to bow so Nola could concentrate on rowing with one oar while I paddled and steered us from behind. She agreed to try this arrangement. My bowline to her stern haul loop wasn’t a secure connection. The yellow rope squeaked as the knot tightened under the strain of our uncoordinated movement.

  As we entered the mouth of the muddy White Earth River, I relished the feeling of coming home. The stranger, despite his pleas for help, had been an intruder. But Nola, what was she? Did she want only food and help fixing her boat, or was she also forcing her way into my life? Or had I invited her to enter it? Was the pleasure of watching her glowing skin so powerful that I’d give up my plans to travel to the Sierra Madre Occidental? The more I thought about this, the more I thought I’d need to discourage Nola from staying very long. I didn’t want my goal of finding my parents disrupted, as it had been with the stranger.

  The late afternoon sun angled into the buttes east of us and revealed the eroded layers of light-brown, gray, and yellow sandstone and the dark folds of these formations, which were dotted with green circles of vegetation. These, too, gave me pleasure to watch.

  The bends in the river required that I pay attention so we’d stay in the main channel. I tried to synchronize my strokes with Nola’s, but our rhythm was inconsistent. We lurched back and forth, the tail and nose of our boats bumping into each other. Over the sound of her oar splashing water—she was a noisier rower than I was a paddler—she began to tell me how she was rowing around Lake Sakakawea for “thesis.”

  I asked her what this meant.

  “Thesis is a type of experience,” she started. “It’s kind of like a test, but more than that. You study something and then write a report. Every senior has to do it. Some do lab studies, others do book research, and then some of us are allowed to go outside the Center for a field experience. I have a friend who’s at a clothes-manufacturing facility that’s sewing her designs based on this cool textile made of bamboo fiber. Because I’m athletic and sort of interested in science, they accepted my proposal to row around the perimeter of Lake Sakakawea and test a new sports nutrition formula. It would have a lot of applications. Military patrols, long-distance truck routes, field explorations. A proven drink would make everyone’s work more efficient. I’m the guinea pig in the trials.”

  “A formula, you mean arithmetic?”

  “Yeah, someone calculated it in the lab. I’m just testing the product. Mix the powder with water, guzzle it down, record the variables.”

  “That’s what’s in the bottle?”

  “Right. It’s an orange color, a little sweet, a constant energy source, but not very satisfying. It gives me loose stools.”

  “Your shit, you mean?”

  “Yeah, kind of loose. Lack of fiber, probably.”

  Nola’s oarlock, the working one, squeaked and filled the air. Her fragile boat seemed only sturdy enough for a day’s outing.

  “Did you row through the storm?” I asked.

  “Took the day off,” she said. “Rested in an abandoned house. Slept in a bed.”

  “I slept in a bed, too, a wide one, in Parshall Bay.”

  “All beds are wide, designed for two to four people . . . I’ll have to pass thesis if I want to be selected for a Diversity Team.”

  “The stranger liked teams, too.”

  “This isn’t a sports or production team, but a special one. You get to travel, not just around Lake Sakakawea like I’m doing, but on expeditions deep into the interior to make contact with other people. To check their genome.”

  “You mean people like me?”

  “No, Pockets, intact breeding populations in remote settlements. You’re just Overlooked, someone the government missed when they emptied out this area years ago. The reproductive program hasn’t gone as well as the government had hoped. They cut the margins too close when they thinned out the continent to fit what they thought was the correct population-to-resource carrying capacity. It’s always best to have a surplus, my father says, wh
ether it’s wealth, education, intelligence, people, land. You always need more than you think you do. People always miscalculate, make mistakes.”

  A surplus was certainly preferable for harvests, I thought.

  “Now the population is starting to crash. We need more people. Diversity. Former Mexico. That’s where we’d search first. Relocation and culling were pretty haphazard down there,” Nola said.

  “My father was from Mexico,” I said.

  “Was he a horticulturalist? Mexico had this massive seed bank. That’s one reason we wanted them to be part of the continental government.”

  “He brewed tesgüino.”

  “That’s a . . . ?”

  “From corn. Not like tequila.”

  “You know about tequila?”

  “I’ve had it.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Smokey, warm. Everything seems alive, until the poison hits you.”

  “It’s not allowed in the Center. No alcohol is. We have pills instead.”

  “It helped me see some things. I might drink it again.”

  “You have some?”

  “No, in Parshall Bay. The masks are guarding it.”

  “Masks?”

  “On the wall. The tequila is in a cabinet.”

  “Are you talking about artwork, maybe, sculpture, something someone collected?”

  “I don’t know. The masks are very old. And tricky. You have to watch out.”

  “Oh.”

  Nola frowned but didn’t say anything. She concentrated on pulling her oar through the greenish-brown water as we made our way around a silent, gentle bend.

  I began to worry that White Earth River might have changed while I was away, and as we rounded Goose Peninsula, I looked for signs of this. The nesting females called out their usual threatening welcome. The drab, gray boathouse on its short pilings, the shaky ramp leading to the dock, and the three half-submerged rowboats were as I had left them, although they seemed more weathered than they had before. Nola bumped her rowing shell against the dock. Because it didn’t have a tether line, only a haul loop at the bow, she steadied it by holding onto one of the pitted dock cleats. I tied up the canoe with a section of the yellow rope and then cut another section to secure her boat.

  “This is it, I guess, huh?” she said. She climbed onto the dock and stood to survey the boathouse, the beach, and the playing field. She pushed her sunglasses onto her head. One eye was blue, the other, green. That was why she wore the black lenses—to hide her mismatched eyes. She was a good head length taller than me.

  “This part of town wasn’t destroyed,” I said.

  Nola frowned and sniffed the air. Geese clucked in the playing field as they searched for insects and seeds and munched on grass and weeds.

  “What stinks? The geese? Or maybe the water’s fetid,” she said.

  “It’s probably the boathouse. The stranger vomited inside,” I said.

  “I thought you said there were no diseases.”

  “The stranger was only sick in the boathouse. One night. Then I took him away. You don’t have to go inside. The rest of the town is okay. And I’m healthy.”

  “You better be. I can’t risk illness.”

  The sight of the geese made me hungry. The thought of their oily meat overpowered my desire to reassure Nola. But it seemed too near dusk to begin what I feared might be for Nola, as it had been for the stranger, an unpleasant experience, even if I used the netting to capture a goose. So I proposed catching fish.

  “You’ll have to teach me,” Nola said.

  “It’s easy. We can cast from shore.”

  I had left the doors of the boathouse open, but still I feared the germs left behind in the stranger’s dried vomit. I sloshed a bucket of water over the floor and swept the dirty water out the back door with a plastic broom. The sound of the water dribbling into the river worried me, and I hoped that any bacteria would wash downriver and into the lake.

  I dug worms in the playing field and baited the hooks. Nola’s casts were natural, fluid and silent. Unlike the stranger, she released the line on the spinning reel at just the right moment and hit the center of the river with each cast. She seemed to enjoy reeling in her first walleye, but I was the one to unhook it and whack its head against the ground, which didn’t bother her. Perhaps she didn’t understand I was killing it, or maybe she knew that this was necessary for us to eat. The fish in the Center came from fish farms, she said, not lakes or rivers. Their flesh was white, but she didn’t know if they were walleye.

  I showed her how to thread a worm onto a hook, which didn’t bother her, either, and then while she fished I built a fire on the beach. I heard a fish splashing in the shallows and saw Nola take it off the hook and hold it by the tail and thwack it against the silt.

  “Hey, During-the-Event, how many fish do we need?” she shouted up to me.

  We already had three.

  “We have time for a couple more. The fire has to burn down to coals,” I said.

  I couldn’t believe how easily Nola had learned to fish and kill the catch, tasks that had filled the stranger with frustration and fear.

  I went down to water’s edge. Three more fish were lying in the silt. We were going to have a feast! I started to gut them and scrape the entrails into the water. Nola unclipped the black square from her waist, held it up to her mouth and spoke to it, and then pointed it at me.

  “This is so primitive,” she said. “And you’re so dark in this light. I wish the fish bled more.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked, pointing my knife toward her black device.

  “Just taking video. I’ll show you later, if you want.”

  “Video?”

  “Like photographs. Only moving. Like movies.”

  Otis had mentioned movies before, their stories, but not in association with devices.

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t mind, During-the-Event, do you? I guess I should’ve asked.”

  “No, it’s okay. And you can call me D. E. My grandfather only called me During-the-Event when he talked about Hidatsa things.”

  “I like During-the-Event better. It’s a man’s name. D. E. is kind of sexless, childish.”

  “D. E. is what I’m used to.”

  “Letters. People talk in letters in the Center. I prefer real names. You become a human being with a name.”

  “Call me Pérez, then. That’s my father’s family name.”

  Her device beeped.

  “Okay, Pérez, excuse me, I have to transmit. Only take a second.”

  She turned and walked down shore, her hedgehog held up to her ear so she could talk into it without my hearing her. I gathered the fish and took them to the fire. Was she mad? Had I angered her? She returned a few minutes later.

  “Sorry. I have to stay in touch. My father’s all for this, but my mother worries. I told them I was sleeping in a boathouse, my sleeping pad bolstered by a bed of life preservers. That seemed to make them happy.”

  I didn’t tell her the stranger had done the same thing.

  “I didn’t mention the cracked oarlock, in case I need a day to fix it.”

  I placed the fish on the coals and turned them by their tails so they would cook evenly and not burn. When the skin began to bubble and pop, I arranged them on a rack of sticks to cool. Using my knife, I separated the moist flesh from the spine. We ate the pieces with our fingers.

  Nola ate fast, faster than I did, and didn’t speak as she chewed. There hadn’t been much to eat in Parshall Bay, and I had had to rely on the MRGs in the house of the masks, where I found the tequila, but Nola devoured two fish in the time it took me to eat one.

  “These are incredible,” she said. “So different tasting than the ones we get in the Center and such a relief after the sports drink. It’s not that I have a deficiency. My blood work is fine. I’m just hungry all the time.”

  “We can eat some vegetables in the garden, too. I need to check on them anyway. I’ve been
away for a few days.”

  “I’m on my ninth day out and that includes a day off for the storm.”

  “How many more do you have?”

  “Twenty in total. Fifty-five kilometers a day. I’m setting a record: first to row around Lake Sakakawea. But I’ve lost time because of the storm. And now the oarlock. I might have to put in some long days to catch up.”

  “Then you better eat another fish.”

  “Thanks, but you look like you could use another one, too. You’re kind of scrawny.”

  The intense gaze of her blue and green eyes made me uncomfortable. I eyed the head and tail of the fish she had finished. A band of meat along the spine she had neglected. I chewed the head of my fish and thought about finishing the remains of hers. I didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, how old are you?” she asked.

  “Not that old. Twenty-eight seasons plus a few years. We began to count the seasons sometime after I started walking and using tools.”

  “Then what, seventeen, eighteen?”

  “Maybe. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  She smiled and bobbed her head from side to side. Orange and blue stones hung from her ears on gold wires; they swung back and forth as she tilted her head.

  “Your early development was probably off,” she said and pointed a long, tapered finger at me. I could hear the material of her shorts rubbing as her legs moved against each other. I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “I mean, food must’ve been hard to come by, huh?” she asked.

  “My grandfather said it was, but I don’t remember. I had my mother’s milk until she died. Then he chewed food for me.”

  “So you could swallow it.”

  I had created images to match Otis’s stories of my early life: wrapped tightly in a blanket, riding strapped against his back, or left napping in a hammock tied to thick trunks of cottonwoods while he worked in the garden or cut wood.

  “I can tell you suffered by your legs and the fact that you’re short for your age.”

  “The stranger thought my legs were deformed, too. He said I was pliered.”

  “Well, your legs are just fine, huh? They’re not deformed, and I’m sure they’re very strong. And you certainly weren’t pliered, whatever that means.”