by Roger Wall
“I never thought I was. That’s just the way he talked when he was mad.”
“Then you’re lucky he drowned.”
It wasn’t luck, but I was afraid to mention the currents again. Or the singing wolves. I didn’t want her to laugh at me.
“The reason your legs are bowed is when you lost your mom’s milk, your body wasn’t quite ready for the food your grandfather fed you. Rickets, that’s what it’s called. I bet there were other times when food was scarce, huh?”
Had it been the cool season when Otis thought about letting me starve? Without asking, I lifted one of the skeletons Nola hadn’t eaten and sucked the meat off the spine. I described the times of near starvation in the cool season, when we ate the same mush of ground corn, sunflower seeds, and sometimes acorns and chewed the inner bark of box elders, and how our snares remained empty, the deer eluded capture, the geese flew away, and fish rested in the cold water at the bottom of the river, uninterested in our bait.
I found myself exaggerating our story of hardship, whereas in fact as Otis and I had become better gardeners and hunters, we suffered less, especially if the cool season was mild and the harvest had been plentiful.
Nola shifted in the sand and cooed in sympathy.
All this talk of starvation made me hungry, and I thought of the garden and how sweet the fresh corn was. I felt my mouth watering and licked back drool that was starting to form.
“You’re probably teetering on the brink of a nutritional crisis, from the looks of you. You have no reserves. A bad week or two and you start to cannibalize muscle,” she said.
I looked at her blankly.
“When you’re not taking in enough food, your body begins to eat up your muscle. It’s only a matter of time before you stop functioning.”
“I feel okay.”
“Maybe right now, but say you have a bad month. No fresh meat. Your immune system crashes, then it’s too late. You get sick and die.”
I wondered if that was beginning to happen when I drank the tequila.
“Let’s go to the garden,” I said. “There’s fresh corn and carrots. First of the season. It’s sweet.”
“Sure, why not? What about the fire?”
“It’s almost burned out.”
“Let me get my kit. I’m beginning to feel chilled.”
She fetched a small black bag from the bow of her boat and slung it over her shoulder.
“Lead the way,” she said.
We walked along the beach and up the path toward the footbridge in the dark-gray light of dusk.
“You know, this place is kind of neglected,” Nola said. “The sunken boats, the rotting boathouse, the unmown field. I’m surprised you’ve stayed.”
“I was born here,” I said. “There’s the garden and plenty of game. We can scavenge clothes from the ruins. I learned to swim and paddle the canoe in the river.”
“I don’t think I’d swim in this water with all the goose shit . . . and the innards you dumped. Maybe it looks okay during the day, but right now it feels kind of hemmed in and menacing.”
She pointed toward the rise of Windy Butte: “And that has a depressing quality.”
I looked up at the rim of the butte. It was catching the last rays of sunlight. I liked this time of day, when the light was fading and the air was becoming cooler. Sunshine isn’t a measure of a place, I thought. Even the ruins of the town looked cheerful on a sunny day.
My spirits dropped when I saw the rows of vegetables. Squash were rotting, lettuce lay wilted on the ground, leaves of tomato plants were riddled with holes, and the broccoli stalks were becoming as stout as small trees. Zucchini were as thick as pike. Deer had broken through the netting and ravished rows of the corn.
“Damn deer,” I said.
“What greedy bastards,” Nola said.
I appreciated her sympathy but doubted whether she understood the seriousness of the damage. I wanted to cry. All the work that had gone into the garden, not just this season but also all the seasons since I was old enough to help Otis, seemed on the verge of being lost. And it was my fault for leaving, for staying away so long. If I’d killed the stranger, gotten it over with quickly, life could’ve returned to normal. I wouldn’t have been stuck in Parshall Bay looking for the sail. I wouldn’t have wasted time meeting Nola. I wouldn’t now be facing a possible cool season of scarcity.
Without speaking, I ripped an ear of corn from its stalk and pulled back the husk and devoured the ripe kernels. I savored their sugar. Nola stood by and watched. When I finished my ear, I snapped one off for her and showed her how to form a handle with the husk. She couldn’t keep up with my pace of eating, though. I needed the corn as much as I had needed the fish. I stopped eating after the third ear. Nola had finished only one. I cleaned the stray kernels that she had missed on her ear and threw the cob into the dirt.
“I look forward all season to this, being able to eat corn in the fields. It’s sweetest right after you pick it,” I said.
“It doesn’t need anything—butter, salt, pepper,” she said.
“That’s right, it’s good by itself.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get that fucking deer.”
“Do you sleep on the ground?” Nola asked after we had eaten two carrots. “I don’t like to, but I can. I have a pad that makes it not so hard or cold.”
“After my grandfather died I did, but then I moved into a monorail car. I cut sod for a bed and lined it with dried grass,” I said.
“Is that where we’ll sleep tonight?”
“No, we’ll sleep in the cave. It has beds. Not wide ones. Only narrow ones.”
“The cave?”
“Up there.” I pointed to Windy Butte.
“I can’t see it.”
“No, not from here. You have to climb the butte. That’s why we were never detected, even when people wandered through the valley.”
“But now you’re not hiding in the cave.”
“No, now it’s different, with my grandfather having died.”
“Okay. But you’re going to show it to me.”
“Yeah.”
We started up the grassy terrace. We bypassed the collapsed houses of the town, to the left, already hidden in the shadows that darkness had brought to the valley. I led her around outcrops and along dusty benches toward the upper slopes of Windy Butte, where the remains of sunlight, reflected by a few clouds, made it easier to see the path. Still, I avoided the steep slab, a route I was sure she could skip up during the day and perhaps even under a full moon, once she learned the way. She walked behind me, close enough to touch, and I wondered if she sensed the animal spirits nestled in the butte. Flat, dark-blue clouds rimmed in red filled the sky. I knew it would be sunny tomorrow.
I didn’t want to reveal my worries about a snake having taken up residence in the cave. Otis and I always returned to the cave well before dark, and the one time we did find a snake—a bull snake, not poisonous—I killed it with a shovel. The meat tasted fine, but we didn’t tan the skin correctly and it fell apart.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t have any candles. We’ll have to go slowly. The back of the cave is very dark.”
“Wait, I have a light.”
She reached into her black bag and pulled out a flashlight. I took it from her and watched as its beam filled the entrance with blue light. I shined the light into the back corners of the cave, under the beds, and over the willow matting. The sight of everything—the furniture, stove, and shelves of dishes, books, and pots and pans—reminded me of what I had missed. I stepped inside the cave and ran my hands over the table to clear it of grit, to feel its familiar surface.
I motioned with the light for Nola to enter. She stooped and passed between the stove and the wall. When she stood up, her head nearly bumped against the ceiling. I turned the beam upwards and caught the drawings I had smeared in the soot on the cottonwood beams.
“Oh, those . . . my mother would love them,” she said.
&n
bsp; “I was young,” I said.
“They’re worthy of a museum.”
I liked the way Nola’s light sharpened the stick figures and animals. They weren’t threatening like the masks on the wall of the house in Parshall Bay had been, but comforting, welcoming. I had made them one night during a cool season. While I had stood on a chair and smudged the drawings in the soot with my finger, Otis had simmered a rabbit in a broth of onions, garlic, and potatoes. He sang a song with English words: “If you remember me, I’ll remember you, and the memory will pull us down the road.” His English songs always sounded better than his Hidatsa songs, not only because I could understand the words but also because they had a melody that I could hum.
“And the furniture. It’s so rustic. I love it,” Nola said.
“My grandfather scavenged it, except for the beds. He made those with lumber from the Catholic church. He said it helped him remember his wife. She was Catholic. He wasn’t.”
“He was romantic.”
“Hidatsa. That’s the type of Indian that used to live here.”
“Maybe that, too.”
“He wasn’t really Hidatsa, though. He just wanted to be. He wanted to go back to a time before all this, before there were white people.”
“Hmm.”
“I guess you can sleep here,” I pointed to my bed. “The mattress isn’t as comfortable as the ones in a house.”
“You’ll sleep with me, right?”
“I was going to sleep in my grandfather’s bed.”
“No, you don’t understand. I never sleep by myself. As soon as I stopped sleeping with my parents, I started sleeping with my cohort. That’s why thesis is so hard. Sleeping alone in abandoned houses or in the dark on the muddy shore is more difficult than rowing all day.”
“There’s probably not enough room for both of us.”
“Sure there is,” she said. “I’m not fat.”
She set her flashlight on the wooden stand between the beds and peeled off her purple rowing top. Small pale breasts sprang forth and caught the blue light reflecting off the cave wall. She turned toward me, as if to point her two hard brown nipples at me. Her breasts had been flatter and firmer, hidden under the purple top, and now they looked out of place against her dark chest. She worked off her pants and kicked them across the room. Her groin and buttocks caught the light, too. Without clothes, she seemed to move in a different way, as though she had one body in her rowing clothes and another when she took them off. Her buttocks shook, for one thing, and she rounded her shoulders and caved in her chest, for another, as though she were cold from the dampness in the cave.
“You’ve probably never seen a naked girl before, have you?” she asked.
She stood up straight and smiled, with her hands on her hips. Her white teeth beamed from her golden face.
“Just in the photographs at the house,” I said.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t count. Come on, take off your clothes. I’ll give you a tour.”
She sat on the edge of the bed and watched me slip off my shorts and pull my shirt over my head—I never bothered to unbutton it. I let the clothes sit in a heap on the willow matting near my feet. My body had none of the pale areas that Nola’s did, since I often didn’t wear clothes in the middle of the day or when I was on the river.
“Come on, sit down beside me,” she said.
The smell of her body was strong: sweat baked into her skin by the sun, the faint smell of fear, and a musty, woodsy odor that I’d never smelled before.
“OK, give me your hands,” she said.
She took them into hers and breathed on them.
“They have to be warm for this. You ready?”
I laughed and said yes, wondering if she were about to tell a joke. She placed the palms of my hands over her breasts.
“You can’t feel much when you touch me this way, can you?”
“No.”
And it was true. The weight of my hands squished her breasts into her chest.
“You have to do it like this.”
She moved my fingers across her nipples.
“Lightly,” she said, “squeeze them, but not too hard. That’s right. Keep doing that . . . and you can . . .”
I felt her nipples become taut. She turned and she kissed me on the lips. I tasted salt and the sourness of her fear. Her tongue began to swim around my tongue, along the insides of my cheeks, against the roof of my mouth. She held my face between her hands. She opened her mouth wider, like a fish, and pressed her lips hard against my mouth. She had a very long tongue. To keep my balance I held onto the thin mattress.
She stopped kissing and pulled back and breathed hard, catching her breath. She had a heavy look on her face, as though she were dazed or sleepy.
“I forgot to ask you,” she said. “Did you sex with the stranger?”
“You mean drive the bone?” I asked.
“Is that what he called it?” She laughed. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Boys sex with each other all the time. So do girls. We all have our own words for it.”
“He offered to do me, but I told him I was saving myself for my wife.”
“Oh, how romantic! So I really am the first.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then. Do you know what a clitoris is?”
“No.”
“What about a vagina?”
“No.”
“Okay, we’ll start with the clitoris. It’s sort of like a penis only a little smaller.”
She lay back on the bed and spread her legs. She guided my hands to her groin, which was moist.
“There. You feel that?”
She had placed my finger on a firm little bump.
“You’ll lick this with your tongue. Not for very long. Start gently and then build up pressure.”
It seemed an odd thing to do, but I had enjoyed kissing her and liked her musky smell. So I did. I felt it grow in size and firmness as I licked it and Nola pushed my head into her groin. It was difficult to breathe, and with her thighs pressed against my ears, her groans were muffled. When she stopped and let go of my head, I rose up panting.
She grabbed my penis and licked the end of it. The warmth and wetness of her mouth made it swell to the size it sometimes reached in the middle of the night as I dreamed.
“Now, we’re ready for the vagina.”
She tapped my chest.
“Lie back,” she said and then crawled on top of me.
She fumbled to get me inside her. Her opening wasn’t as moist as her mouth. I felt pressure—she was moving around—then wetness and warmth.
“Oh!” she gasped. I smelled the fish on her breath.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Don’t move, just stay still,” she said.
She grabbed my wrists and held them against the bed next to my head. Her movement was slow and random at first, but when her blue and green eyes began to cross, it became a concentrated rhythm. She bore down on me and clutched my shoulders to help her slide faster. Then she started grunting.
“Come on, you move, too!” she shouted.
Her breasts quivered above me. The bed creaked and rocked as though it would split apart. I felt as though I were a plant buried in her ground.
My penis released deep inside of her. She mashed herself into me and collapsed, smothering me with her body. I held her tight, and she filled my ear with atonal sounds, ending with a long, high-pitched moan that faded into silence. She stayed on me, motionless, until I fell out of her, and then she rolled off and lay on her back, knees spread and bent, pointing toward the watermarks and mold on the ceiling. She fanned her stomach. I felt the breeze on my damp body.
“You were almost screaming. And the bed?” I said.
“I thought it was pretty good,” she said. “For a first time.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I couldn’t imagine Otis and Malèna coupling like this in the juniper. The branches couldn’t tolerate such shaking and bouncing. Nor could I im
agine that what we had just done was the same relaxing pastime that Otis had hinted making love was. I rested a hand on Nola’s knee, and she scooted against me, her wet groin against my thigh.
“Look,” I said, and pointed to my penis. “Is that from you?”
“That’s nothing. A little blood. Forget it,” she said and frowned. “You know, you’re not very enthusiastic.”
“Were we making love?”
“That’s an old term. Sexing is the correct term. We were sexing on the frontier.”
“Is it like this every time?”
She squeezed my belly and laughed.
“No. It’s never the same. And it’s best to forget your first experience as quickly as possible. Then you’ll want to do it again. And the more you do it, the better you are, the more intense the sensation. You’ll see. We’re just getting started.”
“My grandfather hinted at this, and it seemed to be the only thing the stranger wanted. But I wasn’t sure what they were talking about.”
“You would’ve figured it out sooner or later. You would’ve met someone.”
“That’s what my grandfather, thought, too. You do this every night?”
“Most nights, and sometimes during the day. It depends on who’s around and if we have free time. Boys, girls, we like to do it together, huh?”
“You pick someone and just start doing it. That’s what the stranger said.”
“Both people must agree. . . . And think, if I’d been ovulating, I’d have gotten pregnant. My eggs, your sperm.”
“My sperm?”
“What you left inside me. If my ovaries had released eggs, they’d be joined together by now.”
“That’s how it works?”
“When the lab isn’t involved.”
I had never considered how I came to exist. Otis had never talked about it or how other animals entered the world. Our focus had been on how long it took to kill animals once they’d been caught or trapped and then how to respect their spirits. That my parents had done this sexing, perhaps noisy with drink, seemed hard to believe. And Otis and Malèna entwined and making love, whether in a bed in Bismarck or in the sap of the juniper—it all seemed to be of another world.
“But I probably can’t escape the lab,” Nola said. “I’ll have to be implanted with sperm not of my choice. That’ll make it easier not to keep the result. Just another lab rat for the dorms.”
