by Roger Wall
Nola had dragged driftwood from the riverbank. She was wearing Otis’s old straw cowboy hat tilted back on her head. It was stained with Otis’s sweat, the brim crinkled and bent, the black headband dusty and gray.
“I’m gathering kindling, Pérez. Isn’t that what you need for a fire?”
“Yeah.”
I laughed out loud this time when I heard my father’s name.
“You’re feeling okay, now?” I asked.
“Much better. I just needed a nap, that’s all. Headache’s almost gone, but I’m still looking forward to that tea you promised.”
I built a fire over the charred remains of the ones I had made while living in the monorail car and boiled the root of the ground cherry until the water turned light brown. While the pot cooled, I stirred in a big spoonful of honey and comb, tasted the tea for sweetness, and added another one.
“You’re going to like this, I know,” I said.
I poured Nola a mug, and she took a long sip.
“It’s a different kind of sweet from the powder, and I can taste a sharpness underneath,” she said.
“That’s the ground cherry.”
“It stays in your throat.”
“Honey’s good for sore throat, too.”
“Thanks, Pérez. I was really starting to fade.”
“But you’re okay now.”
“Yeah, fine, don’t worry. I have a second wind.”
“Then you’re ready for a deer? There’ll be a lot of them soon, in the meadow, when the light fades.”
“I’ve been waiting all day for that.”
“Good.”
As we drank the tea, I explained how we would tie the fine black netting onto lengths of cottonwood and hang them on branches so the deer would become entangled in the mesh when we chased them toward the woods. I would set bait—ears of corn on sticks. We would have to wait, maybe a long time, and maybe we wouldn’t catch one. Maybe we’d end up eating only corn and greens.
“Sometimes you can get close to them,” I said. “The trick is not to scare them until you’re ready to charge. You have only one chance. You have to be certain. Otis and I have tried everything.”
“Otis?”
“My grandfather.”
“You use his first name? That’s really funny. We’re the same, you and me, calling our parents by their first names.”
“It’s what his workers called him. Like the elevator. When he did iron work in the Center.”
“That’s so funny.”
I resumed telling Nola about trapping a deer.
“Anyway, I think it’s better if you club it while I hold it down in the net. It doesn’t take much, just a few quick blows to the head.”
“Henry and June. Otis. Imagine if they met? What would they talk about?” Nola seemed not to be listening to my explanation. Then she shook her head and apologized: “Sorry, go on.”
“If we get one in the net,” I said, “we have to kill it quickly before its fear spoils the taste of the meat. The young ones sometimes break their legs when I pull them to the ground. They usually bleat, too.”
Nola drank the rest of her tea and then set the cup down on the bench. She didn’t say anything for a while. She took off Otis’s hat and wiped the sweat from her head. She pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head.
“I think I know what you mean. It’s primal,” she said in a serious, even voice.
I had never heard the word she used, but from the way she used it, I understood what she meant and took it for consent.
“Yeah, it’s like that,” I said.
We lay in the grass behind a spread of goldenrod. Ears of corn that I had skewered on stakes were posted on the other side of the goldenrod, close to the edge of the field, where the grasses and weeds merged with the trees of the forest. As we settled into our hiding spot, I heard flies and bees buzzing over us. As the light dimmed in the valley, the chirp of crickets became lower. Our breathing was slow and close. I felt our hips touching, which aroused me. I stretched my neck to kiss Nola, and she opened her mouth as a fish does, moaned silently, and slid her hands under my shirt. I pulled off our pants and moved on top of her, planting my palms on tufts of flattened little bluestem to steady myself. I kept kissing her until her breathing quickened and she began to swallow, trying to contain her groans.
“That’s the first time you’ve climbed on top of me,” she whispered when we were done. “You can do that more often, if you want. I like looking up at your face.”
We fell asleep with our arms wrapped around each other, our pants half off, down at our calves, ants crawling on our legs.
Later, I awoke to the faint sound of chomping. A wedge of panic rose through me and set me on edge, alert. I had thought the deer wouldn’t come, that we could forget about killing one and settle for a lazy meal of vegetables. But now that deer were nearby I wanted to kill one. I crouched, rising just high enough above the goldenrod to see six of them on the fringe of the meadow, with their necks extended, their heads dipping forward under the darkening sky to pull the corn from the sticks.
“They don’t notice us,” I whispered into Nola’s ear and inched my pants up over my hips.
We made our way through the goldenrod, Nola following the silent path I made between the plants. Just before moonlight replaced the dusky sky, a fawn stepped forward, away from its mother, and began nibbling on one of the cobs. We waited until it was taking big bites from the ear of corn. The other deer had moved up meadow to the other stations of bait. Nola slipped her hand through the leather thong of Otis’s club. I inched away from her, out of the cover of the goldenrod and through the grass, toward the fawn. The fawn turned its head but seemed not to see me or was unaware of the danger it faced. It returned to pulling the ear of corn off the stake. Nola crept forward and paused and waited for me to take the next step. I weighted the stalks of grass gently, flattening a clump so my toes had a firm purchase to grip as I prepared to sprint.
I stood still, listening to the fawn chew, watching its ears twitch as it shooed away flies. I felt my skin tingling, telling me to rush the deer. I squatted and then burst forward. Within seconds I had accelerated to a low charge, arms outstretched as though I would embrace and wrestle the deer to the ground. The fawn bounded toward the forest, became snagged in a net, and began to jump, further entangling itself. Nola hung back. Otis’s club dangled from her wrist. What was she doing? Recording with her hedgehog? Yes. I pulled the net toward the ground, forcing the deer to its knees. Still, Nola didn’t approach but continued to record the deer’s struggles. The fawn started to bleat, pressing its dark-pink tongue against the net. I could hold it down for only a short time before the old nylon broke. I twisted myself to the side of the fawn to give Nola a clear path to strike.
“Hit it!” I screamed.
She stepped forward and swung Otis’s club weakly, landing a blow on the fawn’s back. The fawn jerked upwards, splitting the net with its head and opening the skin in the corner of its eye. Blood filled the widening cut.
“The head!” I shouted over the high-pitched bleats of the fawn. I held its front legs and pushed a knee into its rear haunches.
Nola’s swings became more focused. She dropped her hedgehog and adopted the posture of someone splitting wood and shrieked each time she connected, in the shoulders, on the neck. When the skull split open, I felt a warm spray of blood on my face. Fluid oozed out of the fawn’s nose.
Sweat covered the blond stubble on Nola’s sunburned head, her chest pounded as her lungs took in air, and her face was bright pink, nearly bursting. Her teeth showed, not in her customary smile, but in a bare expression that allowed her to pant freely. She looked at me, not speaking, and then stepped back and watched.
I untangled the deer from the net, flipped it onto its back, and drew a line down its abdomen with my knife. I reached my hands up past the heart, severed arteries, and pulled the organs out of the animal’s small cavity. I saved the heart for Nola. I approximated Oti
s’s version of a Hidatsa prayer that he said when we killed an animal. I murmured the approximate sounds that were supposed to mean “We accept this and offer thanks in return.”
“What did you say?” Nola asked.
“We’ll wash it out in the river,” I said.
I didn’t think she’d understand the prayer, but perhaps I was wrong not to take the time to translate it into English. Perhaps I said it out of habit, of memory, and didn’t want to bring Nola fully into the tradition that Otis had created for us.
We dragged the deer through the field, each holding onto a front leg, and I cleaned out the remains of tissue and clotted blood from the opening and scrubbed its head so there were few signs of Nola’s strikes. I washed my face.
“You want to carry it over your shoulder? It’s your kill,” I said.
“It’s still wet. I don’t think I’d like the feel of that on my body. And I don’t want to dirty your grandfather’s shirt.”
“Then we can carry it by the legs. It’s not heavy.”
I built a fire in the spot where we had made tea earlier in the day and cooked the heart for her. At first, she wrinkled up her nose at the crisp organ, but after a few bites, she found she liked the taste and ate all of it, afterwards sucking on the end of the olive stick on which I had cooked it.
I fed the fire with driftwood until the bed of coals became thick enough to grill the steaks I had sliced from a haunch. We simmered corn that I had trimmed from the cob. The venison was tender.
Our simple meal wasn’t like the ones Otis prepared to celebrate the harvest. Mashed potatoes with onions, garlic, hot peppers; shredded kale dropped in hot water and then mixed with morels; roast corn on the cob and corn cooked with deer fat and sunflower seeds; tortillas smeared with honey: this was the feast we had when the growing season had gone well. Otis sang before we ate, one of his monotonous chants, but in that moment I could tolerate it. At those times I thought our life was perfect, complete.
The coals glowed as though they were breathing. In the faint light I became aware of Nola’s fidgeting to find a comfortable position in the dirt.
“I still feel the sensation. One moment it was jerking around, trying to get away, and the next I was smashing its head in. I didn’t like the way that felt,” she said.
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
“Why not? Isn’t this what you do all the time?”
“I don’t usually talk about the killing afterwards.”
“But that’s what we did, isn’t it, kill it? And for what reason?”
“Next time you see a herd of deer in the fields you’ll understand.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. That there’re plenty of deer, that killing just one doesn’t matter? I’m glad no one recorded me doing this.”
I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. That killing deer was a necessity, part of life? That it was never easy and always filled with a lonely form of fear? I had been much younger than Nola when I had killed my first deer. Even after helping Otis kill them and killing rabbits, grouse, and geese on my own, I had been scared. Nola wasn’t ready for this. She had only enthusiasm for killing a deer, no real knowledge of what it entailed. Otis would have been disappointed in my poor judgment and given me a lecture about disrespect, of the deer, of Nola, of myself. Over the years he and I had developed a ritual for carrying out a kill, one that didn’t involve talking about it, because we both knew what it took, what it meant, that we had to do it. How could I have expected Nola to know this?
I built up the fire again with the hope that Nola would tell me stories about her life, the way Otis used to when we sat around a fire after a harvest meal, but she didn’t. She stared at the flames and watched as the driftwood burned. Maybe she was sorry that she hadn’t fixed her boat or was wondering if she’d be punished for taking a break from rowing around the lake. Or for having sex with me. I was afraid to ask and made no effort to entertain her with stories about White Earth River. We let the cool night air and darkness hide us from each other.
Later, when we both started to yawn, she asked, “Do we have to walk up to the cave in the dark? Can’t we sleep here?”
The coals would keep us warm enough, and a plastic tarp could serve as a blanket, but the ground would be hard, I told her.
“I don’t care,” she said.
I let her sleep near the coals while I spooned against her, my back to the darkness. Even though I was holding her, our clothes prevented us from feeling each other’s bodies. We didn’t make love. The plastic tarp was stiff and crunched every time we moved during the night. It made me sweat. I felt a great unevenness separating us and causing Nola to drift away. Our lives were too different. Maybe this was as close as we could get. She would leave in the morning, I felt sure, and part of me was glad.
I awoke to a faint whine. It came from downstream and the air carried it up the valley. The sound was too regular and high pitched to be someone singing—the way the stranger had announced his presence. I nudged Nola awake.
“You hear that?” I asked.
She pushed away the plastic tarp and sat up. She rubbed her eyes to clear them of sleep. Dark-blue crescents of skin below her eyes signaled worry and exhaustion. She turned an ear down valley, her mouth drawn in concentration.
“Hmm. No, not really,” she said.
“Like a vibration. Far away.”
“Could it be insects? Maybe an infestation? Bees?”
“No, they don’t sound like that.”
“Locusts? Don’t they come every so many years?”
“We’ve never had those.”
“I don’t know, then.”
She yawned and rolled her head to stretch her neck.
“The ground was really hard,” she said. “I barely slept.”
“It might sound a little like insects,” I said, although the faint, even whine was unlike any insect that I’d ever heard.
Nola was standing now. She was scanning the sky down the valley, with her fingers formed like tubes to help her focus her vision. Then she looked at me. Her blue and green eyes were pale, as though the color had been leached out of them. They were not as strong as my dark ones, not able to withstand hours in the midday sun. That’s why she needed the sunglasses, I thought, to protect her weak eyes. She rounded her shoulders so her chest seemed to collapse inward. She looked at the ground. I did, too, and saw my crude sandals, my dry and calloused feet. Loneliness passed over me like a cloud moving in front of the sun. It was a familiar if unwanted feeling and always surprised me when it overtook me. But there was something else that accompanied it, now, desire, which mixed things up, not necessarily overpowering loneliness but fighting with it.
“It’s a Scout, Pérez.”
“A scout?”
“A little plane. Remote controlled. Unpiloted.”
She spoke in an even, calm voice.
“They’re coming for me,” she said. “It must’ve been launched this morning, after I failed to transmit on schedule. My GPS tracking program would’ve shown lack of progress. That’s why they’re looking for me.”
I stood up and squinted in the direction from where the sound was coming. Far away against a cloud I saw something that resembled a dragonfly.
“Run. Just get away. Right now,” she said.
She seemed to have decided what was going to happen to us. She knew more than I did about the consequences of her action, or misbehavior, if that was what it was in the eyes of the government, and perhaps was trying to protect me. I wanted Otis to speak, to tell me what I should do, but I knew it was too soon. He had waited five years for Malèna to speak to him. “The dead,” Otis had explained, “have a lot to learn, just like the newborn. At first all they think about is being dead. Only after they accept that do they have time to contact the living. And the living, they’re not ready for the dead. They must learn how to wait, to listen for them.”
I wondered if this was what Otis had meant when he said he was
practicing, sitting silently on the bench in the garden. I hadn’t done this. I’d had to deal with the stranger, with Parshall Bay. And now this. The spaces in my mind shifted, emptied and filled and rearranged themselves. I turned an ear into the wind and listened to the far-off drone of the Scout.
“Nola,” I said and grabbed her hand. She didn’t answer. Her eyes were large and round. Then I dragged her from the garden, across the road, and down into the basement.
I pushed her down the ladder into darkness, where I lost her until the springs of the metal bed squeaked and revealed her location. How far the sensors and lenses of the Scout could probe I didn’t know but imagined we’d be better protected with the wooden panel blocking the entrance.
Thin lines of light fell through the gaps between the cover’s slats. I stood guard by the ladder and listened to Nola’s sobs, which were muffled by the close, damp air.
“Can they see us through concrete?” I asked.
I felt the cool wall.
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“Maybe we should stand away from each other in the center, not close to the walls.”
Neither of us moved.
“You nearly dislocated my shoulder,” she said. “I think you tore a muscle. My legs are cut up.”
I felt my way to the back of the shelter and sat down on the rotting mattress. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her head against my chest, feeling her fingers dig into my back.
“Can they detect sound?” I asked.
“I’m so stupid,” she sobbed.
“If they can detect sound, maybe you shouldn’t cry.”
The Scout made several passes through the valley. From the increasing intensity of its drone, I guessed that with each pass it was flying lower and lower over the town. I was afraid to move and tensed my body and held Nola so the rusty bed frame wouldn’t squeak. Then, the air was still again. I waited a long time before speaking.
