During-the-Event

by Roger Wall

  Nola was silent for a moment then said, “Let’s not talk about this anymore. Let’s go to sleep.”

  She nuzzled against my shoulder, and with my free hand I pulled the frayed, patched cotton blanket over us and draped my arm around her. “You really melted me,” she said. My body settled into the contours of the cornhusk mattress. A breeze barely made it to the back of the cave and stirred up the musky smell of our bodies. Nola jerked and twitched as she fell asleep. Our quiet lovemaking had let me ignore my memory about Otis’s last day here at the back of the cave. I turned my head now, toward his bed. I could feel his spirit sitting on the edge of it and laughing.

  I clutched the hem of the blanket against my neck but couldn’t fall sleep. I wanted to get up and go to the garden and pick the corn. I wanted to install another rudder on the canoe and sail to the Sierra Madre Occidental. Now I understood what Otis meant when he used to tell me not to waste time.

  Nola was naked, sitting at the table and looking at her hedgehog when I woke up. I hadn’t heard her leave the bed. The soft morning light at the cave’s entrance made her skin look different, less golden and shiny, more dusty and mottled. Her breasts had a different shape, too, softer, rounder, fuller. Freed from the tight purple top and perhaps having benefited from my touching them the night before, they had seemed to grow.

  I pulled on my shorts and cinched tight the deerskin belt. I moved my June berry–stained chair around the table and set it next to her so our bare shoulders touched. She was sitting in Otis’s chair. She smiled at me and held up her empty bottle to ask for water. I filled it with what remained in the inner tube bladder. From her bag she brought out a black pouch containing another device, which was about the length of her flashlight. She removed its plastic cover and inserted its clear rod into the bottle. The rod lit up as she stirred the water. “Just making sure it’s safe,” she said.

  I told her that the water was clean, from the crack in the street in Parshall Bay, and that I hadn’t gotten sick. “I have to treat all sources with suspicion if I want to stay healthy,” she said.

  When she was finished sterilizing the water, she added three envelopes of the powdered sports nutrition formula and shook the bottle. Then she drank without offering to share any with me.

  “Ah,” she said, after gulping down the contents of the bottle. “What a way to wake up. Now it’s time to record some variables.” She smiled, as though this was something I’d enjoy, too.

  She pulled another small black device, a flat circular one, from her bag and set it on the table. She attached a round white patch to her chest and a plastic clamp to her finger. A graph with wavy red, blue, yellow, and green lines appeared on the screen of her hedgehog. The device beeped, and she tugged off the patch and clamp.

  “No change yet. Maybe your food won’t skew the findings after all. Now that would be something to explain!” She punched me lightly in the arm.

  “It was good food,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I’m not supposed to be eating anything besides the formula.”

  “You can’t live on that.”

  “If it’s all you have . . .”

  She let her voice trail off and smiled again, showing her white teeth.

  “During-the-Event, I mean Pérez, have you ever had your blood tested?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s a beneficial test. It can tell you a lot about yourself, huh?”

  “I already know most everything.”

  “I mean useful stuff, like your disease potential, where your family came from.”

  She reached for my hand and placed my finger on an impression in the black circular device.

  “I know where my family came from,” I said.

  “Really?” she said, then, “You’ll feel a moment of discomfort,” as she held my finger down firmly on the pad. “Sample,” she told the machine.

  “My father’s ancestors were from the Sierra Madre Occidental,” I said.

  I felt what was like a bee sting and tried to pull my finger away, but Nola kept pushing it down until she said, “End.”

  I sucked on my finger.

  “The first time it hurts, huh? But you get used to it. I do mine every day. I won’t know the results right away, though.”

  “I have a book. With pictures.” I kept sucking my finger.

  “From Mexico?”

  “Yeah.”

  I got the blue booklet from my rucksack and opened it to the photograph of the man leading his mule to market.

  “The pages are a little wrinkled,” I said. “They got wet.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful,” Nola said.

  She thumbed through the pages and studied the photographs and maps.

  “This is really old. Your grandfather gave it to you?”

  “No, it fell off the shelf in the house with the masks.”

  “And you just picked it up?”

  “Yeah.”

  She returned to the spread of photographs in the middle of the booklet.

  “Well, in any case, you do have a slight resemblance . . . to the Tarahumara,” she said. “But we’ll see what the blood work says.” Then she smiled and handed the booklet back to me. I felt embarrassed for having shown it to her.

  She spoke to her hedgehog, and photographs of people appeared. Their skin varied in tone from very dark, almost black, to pale white, and the color and texture of their hair ranged from straight and yellow to fuzzy and black.

  “My cohort,” she said.

  “Cohort?” I asked.

  “Like a family. We’ve been together since the beginning, but I lived with my parents until I started school. I was lucky. Not everyone has parents. Some of the lab rats can only live in dormitories.”

  “Lab rats?”

  “That’s what we call ourselves. The Petri dish kids. Here they are. Mom and Dad. Hi, June. Hi, Henry.”

  “Can they hear you?”

  “No, we’re not connected.”

  Her parents were sitting at a white table, barely smiling. Her father had white hair and taut, smooth tan skin with no wrinkles. Her mother had the same type of skin but short, cropped black hair. Their eyes looked weary and old, like Otis’s right before he died. Although the photographs were in color, her parents looked less alive than the farmers of the Sierra Madre Occidental or Otis and Malèna in their black-and-white photos.

  “They’re very old,” I said.

  “Sort of. They’re probably in their late nineties, but they’ve been preserved to about age sixty. I think they regret not dying when they had the chance. My father’s a history teacher. His favorite saying is ‘The weight of history is oppressive.’ He thinks that because I’m an athlete, I’ll be able to outrun history! That’s one of his jokes. Whenever I’m in a competition, he says, ‘Movement frees you from the weight of history.’ He laughs every time he says it. He thinks he’s being really funny, but actually he’s only a little funny. Still, I love him. My mom’s a painter. Or used to be. She’s sad all the time, but doesn’t want anyone to know it. She made me these earrings for my eighteenth birthday.” Nola touched the blue and orange stones hanging from her ears. “Kind of a going-away present, huh?”

  “Your mother looks really old.”

  “Well, she’s not really my mother. Biologically, that is.” Nola laughed. “I didn’t happen that way. I mean, a long time ago she of course reproduced the old-fashioned way, but not for me.”

  “So then who’s your mother?”

  “She is! June. I was assigned to her. And Henry.”

  She sighed and then said very slowly: “The way it’s done in the Center is sperm and eggs are joined in a Petri dish. Once the egg is fertilized, it’s implanted in an eighteen-year-old’s uterus. She experiences the pregnancy and delivers naturally. The baby becomes part of a new cohort and is raised in a dormitory, or like me, with a set of old parents.”

  “I was born in the upstairs bedroom, I think.”

  “I’m sure there wasn’t a
lab in your town.”

  “A clinic.”

  “Maybe a midwife, if your mother was lucky.”

  Otis never talked about how or where I entered the world, only that I existed. Nola’s explanation of the lab technique didn’t make much sense to me.

  She spoke to her device again and several photographs sped across the screen of her with hair in different colors and lengths.

  “There. That’s me with black hair, like yours,” she said.

  “Oh, I like it like that. Long,” I said.

  “Well, enjoy the picture. It’ll take a year or two for it to reach my shoulders. It’ll be weeks before I have much more than this fuzz.”

  Otis and I had passed years together where nothing seemed to change, our age or height; even our hair didn’t grow very fast.

  “Hey, you want to know a secret?” Nola asked.

  Her eyes brightened, and she leaned toward me, whispering. I smelled sweetness on her breath.

  “It’s my father’s and mine. He told me because my mother gets upset if he tells her anything disturbing. I think it’s okay if I tell you, since you’re an Overlooked, and this is a story about another Overlooked.

  “Two years ago my father was on a trip up north. It was an award for agreeing to keep on living? He wanted to go to Paris, but of course Europe was off-limits because we had cut off relations with them when the United States retreated from the world and set up the continental government. Who knows what was happening over there. So he settled on a kayaking trip. Armed agents guided the group. My father was the slowest, because he’s not in shape like he was when he was young, and he slipped behind, out of sight around a bend. He saw a man on the shore, standing beside a bush. Tattered pants, not wearing a shirt. His chest was brown, his hair long, light from the sun, and all matted together. My father made eye contact with him. His eyes were blue, both of them. He was maybe ten meters away. The agents had warned them of Pockets. As my father started to drift past him, he turned, to make sure that the guy was still there. He looked so lonely, standing by himself, that my father waved to him. But the guy didn’t wave back. There was some turbulence my dad had to paddle through, then when he looked back again, the guy was gone.

  “Isn’t that a sad story?”

  She sounded as though she might cry.

  “Maybe he was going to fish or swim or just wanted to look at the river,” I said. I wanted her to be happy. “He probably wasn’t alone. I’ll bet he had a family, a grandfather, or a father.”

  “No, he was alone. My father could see his ribs. He was going to die. This was the most authentic moment my father ever had, and I’m the only one he can share it with. If he’d told the agents, they probably would’ve shot the guy. Just for fun. So they could brag about killing an Overlooked.”

  Her voice cracked. She spoke to her hedgehog in a clipped whisper and the photographs disappeared. The screen went blank.

  I thought of the word Nola used to describe me. Overlooked. Would Otis have laughed at that? Been insulted? Embraced it? The Overlooked, a tribe of two. Probably, he would have thought that we didn’t need that name, Overlooked, because he had adopted Hidatsa for us. I wasn’t like the man in Nola’s story, hungry and alone along a river. Maybe having lived with one person made the difference between being Overlooked and being something else, a gardener and trapper, a survivor.

  Nola continued to sit at the table and stare at the blank screen of her hedgehog, as though she couldn’t decide whether to turn it back on. Perhaps she had forgotten to record something. Perhaps the device needed charging in the sun. Perhaps she was weighing trying to fix her boat or call for a new part. Perhaps she wanted to drink more formula. I had no idea. When I asked if her advisor had told her to row back to the lake and get back on route, she made a gruff “humph” sound, as Otis had sometime done, and said, “I’m on thesis. I’m the one who decides what I do.”

  Okay, I thought, and put on my shirt and sandals. I told her that I needed something to eat. Then what she said next surprised me. “What about the deer?” she asked.

  “I’ll have to repair the fence,” I said.

  “The one who ate the corn, though, don’t you have to kill it?”

  “I don’t know which one ate the corn. They all do that, if they can.”

  “But living here you’d know the specific one? Haven’t you identified him?”

  “No. One might break the fence one time, then another, another time. And any deer eats what’s easiest to eat.”

  “Then really you have to punish all of them.”

  She sounded disappointed, and I didn’t understand why she had elevated a random nuisance, a chance opportunity for the deer, to an intentional violation of some rule. I focused instead on her enthusiasm for killing a deer and her strength and endurance and coordination and patience. She didn’t seem to have any fear.

  “My grandfather and I always trap a deer at harvest time,” I said.

  “Yeah, we won’t let them get away with it,” she said.

  “We’ll need to set a section of net in the forest, on the edge of a meadow, and chase one into it,” I said, already visualizing our stalking.

  “I’m a fast sprinter.”

  “They’re not around, now. Later in the afternoon when it starts to cool and the sun lowers.”

  “I can fix my boat in the meantime.”

  “I could teach you how to pick corn.”

  “That sounds kind of tedious. But maybe for a little while.”

  “I’ll give you some clothes to wear. So yours don’t get dirty.”

  I rummaged in the dresser for a pair of Otis’s shorts and a shirt, ones that he hadn’t worn since the previous warm season.

  “Mr. Peter James, he was too old to run from the machines. That’s what my grandfather said. His ribs came apart when I tugged off this shirt.” I handed the shirt to her. “I put his bones in a canvas bag and took them up to the cemetery. They knocked together and made a hollow sound as I walked. My grandfather always insisted we bury any bones we found, even if they weren’t complete skeletons.”

  Nola stared at me as she accepted the shirt and shorts. Without a word she changed into them and stuffed her rowing clothes and her devices in the black bag. As we hiked down the slab of the Windy Butte, I was pleased that its steepness didn’t scare her.

  I showed Nola how to pluck corn with a sharp downward snap. She imitated my motion, but relied on endurance to compensate for crude technique. When her wrists and hands became sore from the work, I let her use my knife to cut the corn from the tall stalks. Meanwhile, I mended the fence.

  As morning passed and the sun bore down on us, Nola took off her shirt. So her skin wouldn’t burn, she asked me to rub a white cream from a small tube over the soft stubble of her head and her back, arms, and chest, with a particular emphasis on her pale breasts. Massaging the oily lotion into them led to sex, and I was pleased that Nola liked it as much as I did, standing in the rows of corn with Otis’s shorts lying on the ground by her dirty feet.

  In the afternoon we retreated to the bench in the cottonwood grove, where I showed her how to braid ears of corn into long strands that I draped to dry over willow rods supported by forked elm posts. Nola began to lag and complained of a headache and held out her hands to show me the cuts and blisters. Her palms were stained brown from grime and the juice of the cornstalks.

  “I’m getting heat stroke,” she said. “Usually by this time of day I’ve jumped into the lake a few times to cool off.”

  “Make sure you drink a lot of water.”

  “I don’t like the taste. The smell, either. Not even the powder disguises it.”

  “I’ll make you some tea. The water tastes better once it’s boiled.”

  I told her where to find Otis’s hat and the pot and two mugs in the cave.

  “You remember the way up the butte?” I asked.

  “Can you go, Pérez?” she asked. “I’m feeling nauseous. Headaches always make me feel sick to my s
tomach.”

  I liked that she had stopped using During-the-Event and called me by my father’s family name.

  “Sure. But stay in the shade,” I said and pointed to the bench.

  I started off in a jog. Where could I find a patch of ground cherry to brew for her? Honey would make the tea taste better. Otis added it to hot water along with butterfly weed root to soothe sore throats and coughs. Maybe I could melt some of the comb for Nola’s hands. Deer fat would be good for her sore and dry hands, too.

  Nola woke up when I set Otis’s hat over her face.

  “The leaves.” She motioned toward the branches of the cottonwoods. “They put me to sleep.” She sounded as though she were still in a dream.

  “They do that to me, too. Keep sleeping if you want. I’m going to find some ground cherry and honey.”

  “Be careful, Pérez, don’t get stung.”

  I laughed to myself over the sound of my father’s name. It made me happy to hear it. I headed off toward the monorail car, following worn deer trails down the valley, through meadows and past clumps of willows and Russian olives until I found ground cherry. The yellow-green flowers were nodding toward the ground, and the lance-shaped leaves stood out against the surrounding grasses.

  Across the river were a field and woods that spread up a slope. Deer often passed through the meadow and grazed on the grass and buds and flowers. If we could hang nets in the trees, we might be able to chase a yearling into them. I had killed a deer by myself only a few times. It was easier to do with two people. And I didn’t want to celebrate the harvest without venison.

  Otis had always been the one to remove the covers from our four hives and brush the bees off the frames in the supers. Most of the time he’d managed not to be stung, while I had watched from a safe distance. We would wait for calm, dry conditions, later in the day when the temperature had gone down so the bees would be less aggravated.

  As I lifted a wooden cover, I remembered Otis’s quiet but quick movements amid the humming and vibrating and tried to breathe slowly and evenly. I held a frame over the white plastic pail and cut out the comb. It was thin and waxy but would taste sweet nonetheless. I didn’t want to take the time to scrape off the caps and drain the comb. Bees circled around me and flew up against my face. The ones that had fallen to the ground crawled onto my feet. I didn’t try to brush them away or swat at them, and eventually they left me alone. I placed the cover back on the hive and tied a torn square of nylon around the pail’s opening. This is how Otis had done it.